Zenna Vortex: Black Cat, White Moon
by LA Knight
Summary: Across the world, she has searched for him. Now she stalks him, a predator after her prey. Now, she hunts him. She loves him. And she's determined to kill him. Unfortunately, so is pretty much everyone else. "Demons of the Mind" redone.
1. 00 Nymphetamine Huntress

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Prologue I  
Nymphetamine Huntress **

_._

_Evanescent like the scent of decay  
I was fading from the race  
When in despair, my darkest days  
Ran amok and forged his face_

_._

He was near. She could smell him. It was a sweet, heartwarming scent: Old Spice aftershave, water, chalk dust, ink, the old smell of books, the sweet smell of roses. At first, it was only in her mind, pulling her towards her prey. Now that scent was merely a sweet brush against the inside of her nostrils, but the further along she went, the stronger the smell would become. And Razielle desperately wanted to find the source of that smell. Find him… she had hunted for him for so long. Why had it been so hard to find him? Months, to find a man who wasn't even trying to hide. Months, to find the FBI agent her master wanted dead.

Maybe she was getting old. Old and tired. She felt like mist, grey and evanescent, but this mist inside of her tasted of death, stank of decay. Not the decay of flesh into rotting meat like rancid beef, but the decay of what lay inside: the ever questing shadow of her Eternal Sigh, her deepest self, rotting like poisonous gas inside her. Maybe that was why it had taken so long, this venom in her soul. She had never felt so torn and tired, bruised, uncertain. The entire length of the hunt, she had longed to bring him down after this long, sweet chase, but at the same time… at the same time her pulse quickened with almost exquisite terror at the thought of killing him. This mark frightened her, but that inexplicable fear infuriated her and stirred the longing in her for a more violent chase and take down, the wind in her face, blowing her dark brown hair around her and the stars mirrored in her emerald cat eyes. with flesh torn beneath her nails and blood splattering her skin and soaking her clothes. That kind of chase, through concrete jungles of glass and metal and stone, out into the wilds, tracking her prey by the scent of his blood….

But even with that stirring to take down this mark, this FBI agent that Dragon wanted tormented, dead, and buried six feet deep, she felt so faded and worn, like the world just before a sun goes nova. These were such dark days for her, because the matching Sigh that was meant to touch and breathe with hers, the absence of that matching Eternal Sigh, that eternal life breath, created a vicious pang in her chest that echoed in the emptiness of herself. Murder sang in that emptiness, the thrill of the hunt and the taste of fear rolling off of that which she hunted, the marks. Darkness and despair threatened to swamp her. Only the violence of her kills beat the antagonizing shadows from her. Maybe this kill would banish them all. This angel's blood, maybe it would cut the bonds of eternity's burden from her.

Reaching into the pocket of her tight, black jeans, she pulled out the photograph of her mark. Dark hair, like dirty pale gold, almost flipping over one eye; eyes like dark, varnished wood, but full of haunting shadows and pain; flesh so pale as to be almost translucent, like a thin sheet of alabaster over muscle and bone. And at his back, if she looked at the photograph out of the corner of her eyes, a pair of tattered white wings unfurled to show matted blood, loose pinion feathers, dirt and grunge.

Her heart ached for those wings, battered and bruised as she was, but she walled her heart off with blocks of ice and focused her attention on the task that Dragon set her: kill her mark. Kill the man in the photo.

Kill Spencer Reid.

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**Author's Note:** I don't own anything copyrighted by anyone who isn't me. The lyrics at the beginning of this chapter are from the song _Nymphetamine Overdose_ by the band Cradle of Filth. I loves them. However, the original line is "forged her face," but Reid's a guy, so I changed that part.

The title of this fanfic is inspired by the retold fairy tale anthologies by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling: _Snow White, Blood Red; Ruby Slipper, Golden Tear; Silver Birch, Blood Moon;_ titles like that. This fanfic draws heavily on the tales from the Brothers' Grimm. The main inspiration is _Puss In Boots_ and _Beauty and the Beast_.


	2. 00 Hunted Despair

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Prologue II  
Hunted Angel**

_._

_Evanescent like the scent of decay  
I was fading from the race  
When in despair, my darkest days  
Ran amok and forged her face _

.

_BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!_

With a graceful sweep of his hand, Reid swiped the alarm clock off of his bedside table and onto the floor. The force of its descent and the crashing impact were not enough to murder its incessant beeping, and in fact slid the clock far enough under the bed that he had to get out from beneath his warm covers to smash a fist down onto the blasted thing. He'd just managed to get to sleep, finally, after being plagued with visions of that brutalized, broken child….

And then Gideon had called, told him about the new case, and had left him an open invitation. He could come, help the team, or hide under the covers and try to forget.

"Why? Why now?"

He tried to haul himself out of bed, but tripped when he found his blankets wrapped around his legs. He hit the floor with a resounding thud and a grunt of pain. He could practically see his pulse throbbing in the corner of his right eye. He had learned recently that fury tasted like blood and pepper, and smelled like burning plastic. Just how freaking bad could the day turn out, if this was the beginning of it?

_Well,_ part of him murmured, _not so bad. Not so bad as some days. Not like some days. Not like yesterday._

Not like yesterday, when that girl died in his arms, her ruby blood soaking into his pristine white shirt, her breath rattling in her chest, her hand so slim and clutching his so tightly. Despite her grip, she was like a wraith in his arms, a ghost, and her life's blood had poured from her body like water and wine with only the vicious fear in her eyes and the soft sigh of a fading spark. Remembering that girl's face, that girl only twelve years old, that evanescent wisp of a thing that even now rotted beneath the ground, marinating in embalming fluid and the reek of her own decaying corpse, he wondered briefly if he wasn't going mad, and then remembered that crazy people actually believed they were the sane ones.

But the girl... only twelve, and reduced to that thing, that maggot-ridden thing by the lightning quick lead fangs of a gun-toting demon. That poor little girl... that _girl_....

"Wake up, Reid," he muttered to himself, yanking on the power cord to reveal the source of that hideous noise, and brutally silencing the shrieking clock. "Forget about it. Just forget about it."

Hauling himself to his feet, ripping the blankets from around his legs, he staggered almost drunkenly to the bathroom. He needed his medicine, that's what he needed. The sweetness of being numb, the absence of pain… because these days everything hurt. Everything, physical or mental. It hurt to think, because thinking reminded him… reminded him of everything. Rossi's disgusted looks, JJ's bitterness masked behind her cheerfulness and willingness to work, her ability to pretend that he hadn't ripped her heart out when he'd refused to go out on that second date because she wasn't the kind of girl he needed even though she was princess perfect….

Thinking reminded him that Elle was gone, that the guys were starting to notice that something was different about him, that JJ was harboring a grudge even though she was happy now with her baby and the baby's father. Thinking reminded him of that little girl bleeding to death in his arms.

Quickly, he unscrewed the cap off the pill bottle and tossed back four white tablets. Almost instantly, he felt better. Much better. He was so glad today was his day off. He could sleep, and maybe, with the drug in his system, he wouldn't dream of the child, that little girl, her hair tacky with sticky red, her lips blue, her face turning that hideous corpse gray, her blood gushing everywhere, all over the freaking place, it was just _everywhere…._

Bile rose in his throat, and he barely made it to the toilet before everything he'd eaten the night before gushed out of him with almost violent force.

.

When he was finished, he carefully put the toilet seat down and laid his cheek against the cool porcelain. His face felt hot, his cheeks burning, and he was having trouble focusing. He'd also probably thrown up the pills, blast it. He should just go to bed, really. He ought to, ought to just go back and collapse onto his bed, and just let sleep kiss him back into oblivion. He was fading, he knew that. Fading into nothing, a nothing man, unable to function beyond the memory of that child, and he couldn't do that, because without being able to function, without being able to break past the memory of that little girl, and all the other innocents, he would be nothing, and mean nothing. He'd cease to exist, somehow, he knew that.

Gone. Just like that. Poof. That would be the end. And he really didn't want to go out like that, because once you went poof, no one remembered you'd ever even existed, and there was nothing to stop you from eating your gun or opening your wrists in the bathtub.

He longed for that shadow at the edge of his consciousness, the black panther he sometimes saw in his nightmares, the black panther that snarled at demons and night terrors, baring her ivory teeth and biting back his fear. She was an angel, that black panther like a sleek winter night hunting down fear. He wished that panther were real, because only she could tear out the throats of his memories and make him no longer some inconsequential, faded, shade-thing.

But she wasn't real, that midnight jungle cat with eyes like emeralds. He'd forged her face when the despair and darkness in him had run amok, threatening to rip him to shreds. She didn't exist.

Not real.

He wished she were.

He got up, flushed the toilet, and went to the sink. He gargled to clean out his mouth, and then splashed icy water on his face. With that done, he staggered back to bed and collapsed onto the almost bare mattress- his covers were still tumbled onto the floor. What the heck. He didn't need to hide under his blankets like a kid afraid of the bogeyman. All the BAU agent wanted to do was just sleep. Sleep was nice....

His phone rang, and he grabbed a pillow and pressed it over his head. Screw the phone. Phone bad. Phono no bueno.

He didn't take the pillow off of his head until Gideon's voice came over his answering machine.

"_Reid? Reid, pick up the damn phone. I know you're there, I need you to answer the phone! You're in serious trouble, answer the phone! We just got a tip, you're in danger!"_

_Spencer's heart, exhausted and barely beating before this, suddenly slammed awake, pounding in his chest. A lump rose in his throat. Blood gushed through his veins, pulsing to wake him up. Danger. There was danger._

"_Reid, answer the phone!!"_

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**Author's Note:** So, that was chapter two. You like? Disclaimer and copyright info was done last chapter, so nothing much to do here except beg shamelessly for reviews. Yes?


	3. 01 Miss Fortune

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter One  
Miss Fortune **

_._

_To the gentlemen I'm Miss Fortune...  
To the ladies I'm Sir Prize...  
But call on me by any name  
Because anyway it's all the same.... _

.

The black Jaguar cut through the night, and the electric city lights glided off the smooth glass windows like luminous rain. How many women – how many _people_- could prowl the Vegas night wearing elegant, mirrored shades, and still be able to track the prey they hunted? Even with that hideously blinking clock, reminding her that Dragon needed to see her.

_Blink-blink-blink!_

The only thing that could keep her from going mad- blinking lights tended to piss her off, especially if they tried to remind her of things she really didn't want to remember- was that smell she followed, tracking it with nose and brain. Oh, and she could smell him, so much stronger now, that delicious smell, and now there was more to it: the scent of smoke, wildness, and pain, pain like the copper tang of freshly spilt arterial blood. That scent tugged at her consciousness, asking her to come and play, come and find him....

Even as she drove through the streets, she daydreamed about stripping naked and rolling like a wallowing puppy in Spencer Reid's blood. Maybe nuzzling his corpse to feel his silken hair against her skin.

_Ugh! _

Where had that morbid thought come from?

She was starting to sound like her mother.

The old night hag would probably get a kick out of that, her precious, lily-white, ever so boring daughter finally giving in to the call of blood, both in the vein and out. It wasn't enough for Shekinah that her eldest daughter was Dragon's best, the oldest of the Dragon's killers- they tended not to live very long, considering how many of them had been taken out by any number of cops, FBI agents, etc.- and the best hunter the little cretin could find, better even than Croup and Vandemar put together.

But no, despite the bloodshed and the excellent track record, her mother was not happy at all with her. Shekinah wanted her daughter to be like her- vicious, cruel, hungry for flesh and blood, the beast-witch of Eastwitch, her father used to say.

Her father had been a bit more… affectionate in his pet names for her, at least: Miss Fortune, among other things. He'd trained her to be a Dragon killer. Her mother had taught her to be bloodthirsty, but her father had taught her to fight, and fight well, not just with the weapons he bore, but the teeth and claws that blood infected her with.

Her father would have known what to do with the mist inside her. He'd told her about the decaying mist before. It infected his kind, the lords of the Kiss de Carabas, the gray mist. He'd told her that much, and told her that it had something to do with death, life, and blood. Maybe something to do with sex, she couldn't remember. _But hang it all,_ she snapped, glancing again at the clock set in the dash, its luminously bloody numbers blinking at her. A trick of every Dragon killer's car. If you had a meeting with the Dragon, it made sure you knew about it.

"All right!" She yelled, slamming a fist down on the steering wheel.

She knew what Dragon wanted. He wanted to know what was taking so long. Spencer Reid should have been dead months ago, pushing up the sweetest of daisies, the softest of posies, now that spring had come. A year was too long, according to Dragon, to spend looking for one human.

Never mind that she was getting old and tired, never mind that as a Child of the Cat's Cradle, she had the right to take however fracking long she wanted, as long as it happened before the mark met a natural death- relatively speaking, at any rate- and as long as there was no deadline. This particular assassin was still blissfully unaware of any encroaching deadline, any time line on the battered angel's inhumation.

Yet the Dragon wanted to speak to her.

_Her. _

Her, daughter of a Hunter, daughter of Shekinah, daughter of the Marquis de Carabas, capable both physically and legally of putting a knife through the little wretch's reptilian heart. But the Dragon was her boss, and she didn't feel like having to deal with the Justices. She didn't feel like being hurt, being punished. Murder wasn't a death sentence, not for someone like her, but still, it incurred punishment. She didn't feel like dealing with it.

Not for one insignificant mark, no matter how sweet he looked.

_._

_Call on me by any name,  
Any way it's all the same..._

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Reid stared into the mirror, straightening his silver-gray silk tie with shaking hands. He didn't want to know what Gideon would say about his appearance. He didn't care about Rossi. The scruffy, Itallian-mobster-looking agent gave Reid the creeps. But Spencer knew Gideon would've been very worried about him. He'd never looked so sheet white before. How often, he had to wonder, had the lack of sleep and the vicious nightmares rendered him into a ghosted, fading shadow-man? He'd taken to wearing black, but it just washed him out even worse.

He looked practically sick. He looked like he had leukemia, with eyes shadowed almost to pitch blackness and bruised looking, viciously bruised looking. When had he become so thin? He was only human, only mortal, a 23-year-old triple doctorate with a shattered heart sucking at his life force until he sank into deepest shadow….

His hands shook as he pulled a comb through his hair. His entire body ached. Maybe just a couple pills. Just one or two, for the pain….

_'You don't need them,'_ a soft, purring voice whispered in his mind. He looked up from the bottle in his hands and stood transfixed, staring at the mirror. '_You don't need them, Spencer Reid.'_

In the mirror, standing as if she were draped around him like a cloak of sable fur, a girl, more like a woman, with long chestnut ringlets falling past her wide, beautiful hips and glimmering green eyes flecked with golden eye bright, rested her chin on his shoulder. She smiled, and he saw bright, pearl white teeth, but there was something familiar and yet all too alien about them, as if they were just a little too long, a little too sharp, and there were far too many....

"Who are you?" His voice croaked out of him, hoarse with surprise, after several moments of attempted speech. "Who… how... what?"

_'Look, I try to be nice to people who are about to die, even if death is a few days off, so I came to tell you, you shouldn't waste your time on things like pain killers and miserable memories.'_

In the reflection in the mirror- the girl wasn't in the bathroom with him, anyway, somehow, but she was there in that reflection, and though he couldn't see her in the actual room, he could feel her. He felt the tiny nibbling bites she placed along his jaw, and he shivered. Her lips whispered against his jaw like silk.

"What... what do you want?"

_'I can't tell you that."_

"_Can't... or won't?"_

_The look the strange, phantom woman gave him was poignant with darkness and understanding. A keen pain lanced through Spencer's chest, and with it came a dull, icy throbbing behind his heart. Her eyes, green as a cat's, pierced him. Goosebumps ran up and down his arms. For a moment, something inhuman seemed to writhe and crawl beneath the flesh of her face, and the battered young man felt a vicious yearning take root in his belly. His stomach twisted violently. Reid fought not to be sick._

_'Won't, because that's the rules. You knew that.'_

"_Who are you?"_

_'A kitten in the cradle,' she murmured, her breath warm and moist against his ear. Shivers tried to crawl up his spine. 'Or a Kitten in the Cradle. You choose. The panther, or the Panther. Death, or your death. Which will it be, do you think?'_

"_Are you going to save me?" Spencer suddenly demanded. The idea was ludicrous – she wasn't even there, wasn't even real, just some freakish, schizophrenic delusion brought on from the stress, he was having a nervous breakdown – but he knew in the pit of his stomach that if she said yes, the young genius would believe her. _

_Fear slithered down his throat to nest in his body._

_'No.'_

"_Why not?"_

_'Miss Fortune is coming to find you, Spencer Reid, and eventually she will kill you, and so, there really isn't much else I can do, now that the warning's been given. I wanted to see you. See why you looked so bruised and broken. You're too sweet a soul to be a slave to pain, or the absence of pain. Don't give into it. Be stronger than that. It's only for a few days, then you'll be dead anyway.'_

"Do you know who's trying to kill me?"

_'Yes.'_

"Who?"

_'Can't tell you that. Good night, Spencer.'_

He felt the press of soft lips to his cheek, then suddenly, the reflection of the girl was gone, and he didn't feel anything. Only air. Emptiness.

Spencer's hands began to shake, and suddenly he remembered his mother being hauled off to the institution, screaming, begging him not to do this to her. Was he going crazy? Were the madmen with warning the most dangerous, fearing madness and yet reassured by their own fear, because no madman ever suspected the poison of the blood in his brain?

He remembered the press of those sweet lips against his cheek, and suddenly felt a vicious ache in his body. Those lips… those silk lips so sweet and tender against his skin… those beautiful lips….

Reid barely made it to the toilet in time. This time, his stomach had nothing to offer up but bile.

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_I'm the fear that keeps you awake  
I'm the shadows on the wall  
I'm the monsters they become  
I'm the nightmare in your skull_

_I'm the dagger in your back  
An extra turn upon the rack  
I'm the whimpering of your heart  
A stabbing pain, a sudden start_

_And it's so easy when you're evil..._

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**Author's Note:** the lyrics seen throughout this chapter are from _When You're Evil_ by the Goth singer called Voltaire. This is a beautiful song, gorgeous violin playing. You may have heard Voltaire sing on Cartoon Network on _the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy_. He's the voice of the evil, brain-eating, singing meteor from outer space.

Reviews, as always, make me a happy camper.


	4. 02 Old Whatsername

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Two  
Rebel Angel**

_._

_._

_She's a rebel  
She's a saint  
She's salt of the earth  
And she's dangerous _

_She's a rebel  
Vigilante  
Missing link on the brink  
Of destruction _

.

Dragon had to wonder three things as he watched Razielle pull into the parking lot of his office. His first thought was to wonder how anyone filled out a pair of jeans like that, preternatural rebel-diva witch from Hell's seventh circle or not. The second thought was more of a silent demand on her unknowing attention: what had taken her so long to get here? And the final thought that popped into his brain was to wonder why his favorite assassin had her best gun in plain sight and in her hand. The thought flashed through his eyes and disappeared as soon as Razielle, patron lady saint of murderers and whores, stepped through the door, looking ready to kill.

He suddenly felt like a slug. Not insignificant- the Dragon would never be that- nor even afraid, really, of the storming she-cat coming, it seemed, to rake her claws across his balls. Oh, no, the Dragon was never afraid. The only thing he really felt, besides that same rushing desire he always felt when confronted by the luscious Lady of the Kiss, was the almost fear a slug might feel when confronted by salt. As if his most tender parts were in danger of being burned alive by the salt of the earth, the salt of the woman's sweat as she ruthlessly attacked him. She'd probably go for his guts, if she attacked him at all. What a delicious little thing she was. So inventive.

He wondered, not for the first time, how it would feel to break her beneath him. It would never come to pass- Shekinah's rage would extend far, jagged glass talons that ripped any who harmed her spawn into bloody scraps of flesh- but it was sweetly intoxicating to imagine her begging him for anything and everything, especially when she was nagging at him to the point where he almost shook with the need to throttle her. Not to death, that was practically impossible, and would take far too long that way. But feeling her flesh bruise beneath his grip, feeling her larynx crush beneath the pressure of his thumbs. Sometimes, sweet as she could be, she really infuriated him, the little demonic darling.

When she kicked the door open, the glass in the door shattered, hitting the floor with the tinkling of beautiful chimes, like the striking of tiny silver bells. Dragon winced, recalling how much it cost to bring the girl to the office. Why did she dislike doors so badly? Her foot and the door to his office were like Batman and the Joker: one ended up being decimated. Usually, the door.

Once, he'd tricked her into kicking something too hard, and she'd broken 3 toes. It had been the highlight of his week.

As per usual, the rookie security guard – he always kept one around, they were good for a laugh whenever they tried this – tried to rush her. The furious assassin pistol whipped him in the face without even glancing at the man. He fell to the ground, blood gushing from his nose. She quickly stepped over him as if this were an every day occurrence, and slammed a spiked heel down on Dragon's desk. Razielle propped her elbow on her knee, her chin on her fist, and glared. Dragon wondered just how much it could hurt to feel a piece of green glass shoved into the middle of his back, right between his kidneys. Her eyes biting into him was what he expected.

"I wondered when you'd get here, darling." He tugged affectionately on the hem of her blue jeans. She twitched out of his grip. Her contempt hit him in the face. The vaguely reptilian man eyed the girl with blazing, red fire eyes.

"Don't call me darling."

"_Darling_, you look absolutely famished," he replied, as if Razielle's disgust were not evident. He popped open the top button of his collar, spread his shirt to show off his beefy neck. "Care for a bite to eat?"

"In your dreams, lizard boy."

But he noticed she was having a very, very hard time keeping her eyes off of the vein pulsing in the side of his neck. "Are you sure?"

"Positive. I'm here for the job. Twenty thousand now, twenty thousand after. You owe me before I'll start this job. I tracked him, found him. No money, no killing. Give it here." She held out a hand, palm open. Dragon grinned his lizard grin and handed her nineteen of the twenty thousand-dollar bills. The assassin flip-counted the bills, never taking her eyes from Dragon. When she realized that he'd shorted her a grand, she held out her hand. Dragon reached out as if to take it, perhaps turn it over and plant a kiss on it… but instead, he slashed her palm with one dagger-like nail, grabbed her wrist, and brought her hand up to his face.

Razielle froze, eyes narrow and glacial. Her left palm itched with the desire to feel metal against it as she carefully contemplated murdering her boss.

"Found him, did you?" He chuckled, and then seemed as if he caught sight of the blood welling up from the slash in her palm. "Well, well," he hissed, grinning, and she tried to jerk away. "Fresh blood…."

His tongue stretched out, intent on catching a tiny taste of the scarlet on her skin, intent on proving to all in this office – and by word of mouth, all who worked for him – that this little witchy symbol of resistance could not stand up to him. He was a hair's breath away from catching the crimson life on his tongue when she suddenly brought her .9 mil up to press the barrel against his temple. Suddenly, a line from a song sprang into his mind as he felt her sheer _will_ close around the heart in his chest –

S_he's holding on my heart like a hand grenade..._

"Don't you remember anything? I'm Miss Fortune, the one they call Old What's-Her-Name. Whatsername. From Chicago to Toronto, from Madrid to Paris, from Rome to Budapest, I was the one they all feared, because they all broke their word. The Lord of the Arch and his bastards, the sons of the fallen stars, the royal family from the Storm Mountains… I made sure they paid for their forswearing of the oaths they made me. They feared Old Whatsername. My mother used to be that, remember? The one everyone's so afraid of, they won't even say our real name. _You_ don't even know my real name. And I have told you, and told you often, that I do not share my legacy with anyone. That was an oath, and I keep my word. I value truth, and honor, unlike some.

"So, Dragon the Dickhead, you take so much as a taste of my blood, and I pull this trigger, and your blood and brains will be all over your lovely paperwork. So, if you want Spencer Reid dead, you'll let me go, I'll get my last thousand bucks, and I'll leave and go kill the little sucker." The hellish green fire in her eyes dimmed a little when she said it, though. "You want him dead?"

"Yeah," he snarled, though his tongue strained to reach the warm liquid spilling from the cut on her palm. "Yeah, I want it."

"Then let me go, Dragon."

His tongue strained closer.

Her finger tightened on the trigger.

Growling, he did what she said. He half expected her to belt him with the gun, but she didn't. Good thing for her, and really, for him, too. He didn't feel like explaining to Shekinah why her daughter was hanging upside down on his wall, nailed to an iron cross, full of spikes. Hatred sliced from his eyes. The assassin tossed back her dark hair and eyed the enraged man with the morbid interest of a wild animal.

"Give me my money."

Dragon saw the tiny, elegantly pointed teeth in her mouth. If he'd been a human, the girl's boss might have shuddered. Instead, he handed the last bill over and held up his hands in the universal sign of surrender.

"Bye, Dragon." Razielle turned on her heel and left, stepping lightly over the prone body of the guard. She called over her shoulder, "Do something about the poor moron, Dragon. I think I broke his nose."

Dragon muttered something obscene.

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**Author's Note:** The lyrics found in this chapter are from Greenday's song (I don't know the title, just that it's on the American Idiot album). And no, for you new readers, Razielle is not a vampire. Reviews rock my socks, especially since I'm busting my booty during vacation to get stuff updated.


	5. 03 The Oncoming Night of the Dragon

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Three  
The Oncoming Night of the Dragon **

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_Besides just being simply strange  
Spawns from some illness of the mind…. _

_It just seems very strange to me  
Not Her quiet lonely streets  
And draped in all Her mystery  
Could be so sweet and comforting _

_For the Night, She calls me…. _

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"I don't know who she was," Spencer Reid whispered for the seventh time. How many times did Gideon want him to repeat everything? "But she was just… just... I dunno... she was all over me. B-but not... not in a sexual way. It was more like she thought she owned me or knew me intimately, but... but I swear I've never seen her before."

The special agent scrubbed ineffectually at his face with one trembling hand, his acute embarrassed obvious for all to see. Special Agent Gideon, his ex-superior, understood. He knew about Reid's mother, knew all about his fear of schizophrenia, an insidious madness that would corrupt his genius, and knew how much it had scared him to see that girl in the mirror. Spencer could see all that reflected in the older man's face. What must his old boss be thinking right now? Reid didn't dare tell him the effects that contact with this girl had had on him. How he longed for that brief dark touch again… even though the very idea scared him practically witless at the same time.

"You've _never_ seen this girl before," Gideon reiterated, just to be sure.

"No," the young genius cried, staring up at his boss with wide, wild eyes. His eyes were almost beseeching. The memory of that girl… of the kiss she'd laid on his cheek, it was arousing, and terrifying, all at once.

But Reid hadn't told Gideon about the kiss. Not that. Only that this girl knew about someone trying to kill him. And why wouldn't she? She was a figure of his overactive – _suicidally depressed,_ Reid thought – imagination, and would of course know everything that he himself knew. It wasn't a struggle to comprehend.

But what _was_ a struggle to understand was the fact that he would give almost _anything_ to keep her from being imaginary. If she were not real, then he really was going crazy.

_You know better,_ a rich, velvet purr filled his head. _You didn't make me up. You're not going mad. I promise. No madder than you were before, at any rate._ The sound of that voice tugged at his heart and made him flinch at the same time. It felt as if the delicate brushings of a spider web were caressing his brain, a soft touch to the backs of his eyeballs. Goosebumps ripped through his skin.

_Please,_ he thought desperately, trying to make that other presence hear him, _if I'm not going crazy, if you're real, please for the love of all that's holy get out of my head._

_Shhh… hush. There's no need for hysterics. I'll go._

And the touch was gone. With the absence of the touch came a rush of doubt. He'd imagined all of that, surely. But if he'd been imagining it… maybe it was the drugs? Maybe the Dilaudid and Opana – he'd found Opana to supplement the other meds when the pain was exceptionally bad – maybe they were causing these… hallucinations?

But _were_ they hallucinations? Reid wasn't sure, wasn't sure at all. How could he not be sure? Well, he wasn't all that sure about that, either. And why did he feel so bereft at the loss of that touch in his mind?

"Reid!" Gideon snapped his fingers right in front of his face, startling him. His heart leapt into overdrive. The young agent winced at what he was sure was a crack in his sternum from the sudden increase in his heart rate. The older agent snapped, "Wake up! Pay attention. We need to know who'd be trying to kill you. Maybe they're… I don't know, drugging you somehow. Would you know if they were?" The FBI agent demanded of his coworker.

"Yes," Spencer replied instantly. He was incredibly paranoid about poisons and toxins and infectious diseases used as weapons. The twenty-five-year-old was extremely careful with what he ingested, what he allowed near his body, anything. It was almost an OCD thing. "I'd know. And I don't know who'd be trying to kill me. Maybe it's got something to do with the new case?"

"Maybe… but I don't think so," Gideon said. There was a darkness behind the agent's eyes that Reid had never seen before, an anger almost, as if someone had... had stabbed him in the back. Betrayed him. The agent continued, "We'll figure it out."

At that exact moment, all the lights went out.

.

_She'll suck you dry  
But still you'll cry, to be back in her bosom  
To do it again  
She'll make you weak  
And mourn and cry, to be back in her bosom  
To do it again _

_(Pray) Til I go blind  
(Pray) Cause nobody ever survives  
Prayin' to stay in your arms just until I can die a little bit longer  
Satyrs and saints, devils and heathens alike  
She'll eat you alive_

.

Razielle glided through the darkness of Reid's work place. This was where the human worked? The BAU building stank of iron and fear-sweat. What kind of sensitive like him – a mortal, no less, a human mortal who was so fragile and mentally unstable compared to the Children of the Night, who could handle the negative energies swirling about a place that made a study of murder and madness – worked for the fracking FBI? No wonder his wings were so battered and bruised and bloodied. Cupid's whipping boy, with bloody stripes of pride on his back and bloody feathers falling like snow in his wake.

The poor baby.

The huntress's weary heart tried to go out to her mark, but she slapped it back, beat it back into its cage of black ice like a whipped dog. She had no time for compassion. Death was in the cards tonight. Only death, no pity.

"Leave no track; don't look back," she snarled, and drew her favorite gun.

Jackal, its gaping maw of highly polished black steel open and begging to rend flesh, settled into her palm easily. Her skin eased around the leather grip of the handle, and shivers of delight slid up and down her protruding spine. She loved this gun, a gift from her Father. And she also loved the paired gift in the twin wrist sheaths hidden by her black bell sleeves – her twin knives: Thornography and Nightwish.

Razielle could take Reid easily with these weapons. Maybe she'd make it easy on him, take him quickly. He was sweet, after all, and hurting. Battered and broken. Capable of inducing pity in her shriveled up heart. Maybe she'd give him a gift of a quick knife across the throat. Maybe a shot through the back of the head, something he'd never see coming. One minute alive, the next minute dead. It didn't matter what she chose. Just as long as it was quick and easy. All she had to do was follow the smell of him down these midnight halls, blanketed in blackness because when someone like her turned off the lights, it wasn't just darkness. It was night come early, the kind you ought to be afraid of.

All the preternatural huntress had to do was keep following the sweetly intoxicating scent of Eros' beat-up crack-child to what would be the end of the world: his death at her blood-stained hands.

Just follow that scent to death.

.

Night had indeed come, following in the hunter girl's footsteps, but he doubted Razielle would be happy about it when she discovered his presence. Sebastian Nox grinned and licked the tips of the fingers on his left hand. The freakish monster tasted venom and pain, blood and the sweet, meaty, spongy taste of raw human marrow. Grinning like a madman, the other hunter began gliding through the darkness.

Sebastian wasn't after Reid's scent, but Razielle's – the stench of feral cat witch on the prowl, hunting, out for blood.

"Bless the child; follow the left hand path. There's a poison drop in the cup of Man." He grinned wider, revealing jagged needle teeth so sharp as to tear through flesh and bone, too many to fit into the semi-human mouth. The demon man didn't seem to mind the strange warping of his mandible and lips. In fact, there were only two two things on his mind.

One: Razielle, daughter of the Hunter, would die, and so would Spencer Reid.

Two: Dragon was going to be so happy.

.

Dragon was sitting right outside in his red corvette. His wife loved this color red; ravenous red, she called it. Dragon was getting hot inside his car in the Vegas summer heat.

Dragon was getting impatient.

Dragon was getting greedy.

And Dragon was getting tired. Tired of Spencer Reid and his genius IQ screwing up the best laid plans of devils and monsters. Tired of the entire team, but he figured he'd get rid of the little rat first, the little Thorn Prince so ignorant of his bloodline and power, so that he could start setting his plans back on the chessboard of Hell on Earth and start weaving the black widow's web for the rest of the world. He'd take care of the rest of them later. But right now he was most tired of Spencer Reid. And really, he was getting tired of the wench, too. He was really getting tired of Razielle… maybe Night would get pissed off enough to kill her, too.

.

.

.

**Please feel free to leave a comment!**

I really do like hearing from my readers, and this is a labor of love and I want to know if my kid is friends with all the other kids. Or rather, my Reid-fic-crack-baby is friends with all the fic addicts out there. So yeah, let me know what you guys think of this. I love to hear from the readers, to see what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, all that stuff. Ta-ta!

Copyright Information:

The first set of lyrics are from the song _the Night_ by Voltaire. I don't remember what the title of the second song is, but it's by Puscifer. I think I spelled that wrong. And Nightwish is a band, Thornography is a CD released by Cradle of Filth, Jackal is the gun that belongs to Alucard in the manga/anime _Hellsing_, and the words that Sebastian says are from a song by Nightwish (though I don't know what it's called).


	6. 04 Betrayal in the Dark

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Four  
Betrayal In the Dark**

.

.

_Watching at the window  
__The ledge which we provide  
__There's someone up above me  
__There's someone scratching softly  
__Little monsters in the chimney  
__All black and stained with soot  
__Come creeping to my bedroom  
__And lead me here to sleep_

_Dancing in your darkness  
__Dancing in your fear_

.

Reid and Gideon stared at each other in the darkness. Reid could barely make out the gleam of his boss's eyes in the pitch dark. JJ, frightened as any human being would've been in this frigid and grasping blackness, was clutching at his hand, her nails pricking his skin. Emily huddled up against their main boss, Agent Hotchner. Morgan had his arm around their computer geek, Garcia.

Somehow, the pitch blackness, the tenebrous night, pressing in on them all, nearly suffocating them, brought a deep and unshakable fear into their hearts, an aching, grinding, bone chilling fear, a terror that gnawed at their souls like rats. Something was coming, something with teeth, something with a thousand eyes, something prowling the halls with murderous intent, something _hungry_. It was coming, coming soon.

"Gideon," Hotch whispered. "Do you know something about this?"

Gideon stared at his ex-boss, as Hotch stared back at his old second-in-command. Gideon thought hard, scenting the air as his brain whirred frantically, trying to figure out what was happening, and if it could be who he thought it was. Could it be Razielle? The little one, the little child he had bounced on his knee, the girl who had twisted and warped into the lethal jungle cat who thirsted for human blood like some rabid thing? Was she the one prowling the halls, hunting for them like they were prey, and she the predator?

"I don't know," Gideon whispered, and looked at the humans – pure humans, all of them, save himself, Hotch, and one other, though the one other knew it not – and wondered if they were all going to die. Because the one person he could not fight, the one person he could not kill, was the Lady Razielle, daughter of the Marquis and the Lady Shekinah.

No matter how much he hated her. No matter how necessary it would prove to be if he wanted to save Reid's life.

.

_If your love is marred by anger  
__Perhaps it wears a mask  
__And underneath those hollow eyes  
__A prisoner is cast_

_Once we have a promise  
__Twice we have a curse  
__Three times is impossible  
__And four times even worse_

_Once we have an accident  
__Twice we have a fault  
__Three times is delinquent  
__And four times is the fall_

.

Razielle slipped through blackness, a carnivorous mermaid through midnight waters. Jackal was a reassuring weight in her palm. The leather of her black gloves, freshly donned, was cool against her skin. Her black leather pants hugged her legs tight, and her black suede boots stepped soundlessly along the tile floor. Her leather corset clung to her torso, keeping her streamlined, keeping her the slimmest of shadows in the dark. She felt the darkness brushing against her skin, a lover's caress. She tasted blackness on her tongue, savored the scent of it. And always was that smell, that intoxicating smell that flared along her body like fire, burning her.

Spencer Reid.

_BANG!_

A blinding flash of pain in her chest. She looked down, staring stupidly at her torso. The pale woman could see dark blood gushing down her front from a tiny hole in her chest, right between her breasts. Razielle brought her hand up behind her and felt around the edges of the raw, gaping hole in her back. Her shirt was ruined. And man, did it hurt.

"Wha… what?"

"Say goodnight, nightingale," a soft, tender voice whispered. Her head jerked up, and she saw the Night himself sighting down the barrel of a gun aimed straight at her. She whispered, "Sebastian… what are you – "

_BANG!_

Her entire body convulsed, and she gasped, falling straight back and hitting the tile floor with a thud. Blood bubbled up from the hole in her throat, welled up from between her lips. She blinked, writhed, realizing she had dropped Jackal and flailing around to find it, grabbing the handle just as Sebastian's foot came down on her wrist hard.

"Dragon said you took too long. Besides, he knew you could never kill your own _romejul_. And you've been getting on his nerves for a very long time." The Night looked down into Razielle's fear filled eyes, knowing that at least one word had penetrated her pain filled mind: _romejul._ In relation to one person: Spencer Reid. Yes, let her understand _that_, before he killed her now ex-mark. Let her understand just what Dragon had wanted her to do.

"Sebastian," she whispered, the blood gurgling in her throat. "Please, don't hurt him…."

"Not him, right? Anyone but him, right? Anyone but Spencer, your precious Spencer, your _romejul_? Anyone but him, right, Razielle?"

"Please…." She whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks. "No… no…."

"Yes," he hissed, grinning wickedly, and shot her twice in the chest.

.

_I will stay here  
__If you believe  
__I will remain  
__If you believe_

_When I sleep I dream in billions of colors...  
__Billions of colors, am I not real?_

.

Reid stared up at Gideon with terrified eyes from the floor, where he lay prone on the floor, clutching his chest. Agonizing pain, as if someone had drilled a hole through his heart, throbbed through him, and he felt as if someone had clawed their way around his spine.

"G-Gideon…."

"Reid! Reid, what's wrong?!"

Reid tried to answer, but couldn't get the words out past the slashing hurt in his throat. He clutched at his throat, trying desperately to speak. He knew, he just knew, that something horrible had happened. He had an image in his mind of a panther lying in a pool of blood, her emerald eyes glazed with pain, reaching out to him with one outstretched paw.

"Reid!"

"P-panther…."

_BANG!_

Emily screamed, clutching her shoulder as blood seeped through her fingers. The lock on the office door hung from the rest of the door by a few splinters of wood. Slowly, the door creaked open, and Reid knew that whatever had hurt the panther of his dreams, it would do more than _hurt_ him.

Without thinking about it, Reid's mind cried, _Razielle!_

_Spencer!_

"Well, well. Found you at last," a midnight voice oozed from the doorway, and suddenly the team could all see what stood in the doorway, the gun in its hand aimed right at the prone Reid's forehead. "Say goodnight, lover boy."

.

_Dear angel  
__Where are your warming wings tonight?  
__It's so cold outside  
__Won't you hold me for a while_

_And angel  
__I feel alone and un-alive  
__The night is frozen  
__And these tears have stung my eyes_

.

.

.

**Disclaimer:** I own nothing you recognize as being copyrighted by someone else. I give all of the citations below.

Reviews make me happy, so... do I get any?

The songs quoted here are _Monsters_ (quote 1), _Tears_ (quotes 2 and 3), and _the Dying Song_ (quote 4), all of which are done by the Cruxshadows. They're my favorite band.


	7. 05 Fighting Back

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Five  
Fighting Back**

.

_Thee I invoke, bornless one  
All woman, pure predator  
Wherein conspiracy and impulse dwell  
Like a seething fall from grace_

.

.

Evil.

That was the only thing he could think as the monster moved into the doorway, radiating pitch Plutonian darkness and malicious cruelty.

Reid stared at the creature standing in the doorway, heart pounding as if it would rip open his chest and explode in a shower of blood and shreds of muscle. The thing aiming the gun at him was, for all intents and purposes, human. But nothing like that could be described as human. The eyes were almost familiar, a toxic, poisonous yellow with slit pupils, and teeth, yellowed and decaying, the tips a rusted brown with old blood, too many teeth to fill a mouth that small. Its jaw was lumpy and misshapen, and its hands… it had hands with fingers like steel worms, and at their tips, long, yellowing, jagged nails dripping with clear amber poison. It was grinning madly.

_Razielle, help me, please… he's going to kill me…._

The words had the feel of some divine invocation, and he prayed that she would help him, whoever _she_ was.

.

_Razielle, help me, please… he's going to kill me…._

NO!

Razielle rocked, rocked her convulsing body until she was on her stomach, pulling her hands close to her body to push herself up. Her breath ached in her lungs, but at least she wasn't gushing scarlet all over the floor anymore. Grunting with the pain of it, she managed to force herself to her knees and hauled herself using the door handle. She shuddered, shaking like a wet cat, and grayness passed in front of her eyes for a moment.

_Razielle!_

_I'm… I'm coming… I'm…._

The critically wounded, preternatural huntress fell to her knees, struggling not to pass out. What was in those bullets, that she was struggling so hard to get back on her feet? Her kind had no allergies to silver, wood, iron, or any other of the common anti-monster materials. Water and powdered moonstone were enough, but these bullets weren't hollowed, and there was none of the familiar burning from those accursed ammunition rounds.

And Spencer… why was Sebastian drawing it out? Why hadn't he killed Spencer yet?

The hunter couldn't see Jackal, and she didn't have the time to grab it, anyway. She had to find Spencer… and somehow, she knew that Sebastian was waiting for her, the same way Spencer was waiting for her. But Spencer was waiting for her to save him, and Sebastian waited… so she could watch Spencer die.

NO!!

Like a black goddess from some primordial time of darkness long past, with a fierce snarl of effort, she rose to her feet and flicked both wrists, unsheathing Thornography and Nightwish. They gleamed, even in darkness, reflecting some infernal, abyssal light. She was no angel, and she'd done her share of evil, demonic things in the past – her father had been so disappointed at her "fall from grace," as he put it – and she'd killed a lot of people, sometimes people who didn't truly deserve it, but she'd be cursed by the mystical guardians of the Cradle if anyone were going to hurt Reid. Not if she and her blades had anything to say about it.

Baring her teeth in a savage, Cheshire cat grin full of madness, malice, and murderous intent, and pushed herself through the brutal and grasping dark, her fury parting the tenebrous cloak around her.

**. **

_Thou art darkest Gabrielle  
Lilith who rode the steed  
Thou art pale Hecate  
Rising from Thessaly _

.

Reid tasted darkness on the air, a sharper darkness than the midnight that seeped from the creature in the doorway, still aiming that gun. He knew she was coming. Razielle, black dream jungle cat, was coming to save him.

"Are you going to shoot or not?!" Garcia demanded.

"When lover boy's whore finally shows her face, then yes, I will. I want to see her agony, her anguish at losing the man she loves, before I put a bullet or twelve between her eyes." The monster grinned, showing its hideous teeth that were too numerous to reside in such a humanoid mouth. "And she's actually managing to make her way here, even shot up with all that Vatican silver. I must admit, I am very impressed. Apparently, her father's blood offsets the weaknesses of her mother's blood. But I'm still gonna kill the irritating little–"

"No…." Reid mumbled, and tried to sit up. "Leave her alone… don't…."

"Shut it, human. I don't care how much you like the little witch, I'm going to shoot you in the head when she gets here, then shoot her, several times, in the head, just to make sure that _this_ time, she stays down. Your girl is very, very hard to kill, Spencer Reid."

Reid tried to go for an uncaring persona and laughed softly, muttering through gritted teeth, "That's my girl. She's going to be a major inconvenience to you, won't she? I bet that really gets under your skin, doesn't it? Beaten by someone like her, even though you're supposed to be better at it all. How many times has she shown you up?"

"Shut up!" It cocked the hammer of the gun back. "That little she-cat is Dragon's favorite, even though he can't get his penis within a league of her without her putting a gun to his head. She does her own thing, with no respect for the rules, no respect for deadlines! And she makes more money than any of the rest of us! Dragon wants her, but if he can't have her, then I get to kill her. Just because she's dead doesn't mean he can't have any fun."

"No!" Reid tried to shove himself up, but couldn't get even halfway off the ground. "Don't you… don't you touch-"

_BANG!_

With a grunt of pain, he fell back on the ground, clamping a hand to his shoulder, blood gushing from the ragged hole in his flesh. He winced, hissing in pain, and snarled, "Don't. You. _Ever_. Touch her. I'll kill you. I'll blow a hole in your head, you stay away-"

_BANG!_

This time it was JJ who screamed when a bullet tore through her stomach. Reid glanced at her and contented himself with glaring at the monster standing over him.

"I'm going to kill you both," the creature hissed. "I don't _have_ to kill your friends, so if you don't want me to, you'd better watch what you say to me. So, let's all sit back and–"

_BANG! _

The monster fell to the ground, howling in agony and clutching his knees, and the knees of his blue jeans were quickly drenched in blood. One of his hands was horribly misshapen, and several of those long, hideous fingers were missing. Twin blade tips glinted from the writhing creature's kneecaps. The gun he'd dropped was leveled at him by Emily, who tried to ignore the throbbing in her shoulder.

When Reid looked first, he thought it was a huge black panther standing in the doorway, sleek and predatory, a demon out of legend, a guardian to bite back nightmares and terrors. But then he blinked, and standing where the panther had been was a woman in black leather. Black leather pants, black leather hand gloves, black leather corset. There was blood on almost every inch of exposed skin. She was shaking violently, but the gun aimed at the thing lying on the floor was steady.

"Razielle?" Reid whispered.

She glanced at him, caught his gaze, and held it. Her eyes were the eyes of the girl in the mirror, the shadow at the edge of his consciousness, the panther angel of his dreams, who came out of the jungles of his night terrors to guard him from every fear. Suddenly, he felt this rich, wonderful outpouring of love washing over him. She blinked slowly, and in that single movement, he knew everything would be all right. She nodded to him almost imperceptibly, and whispered, "Is anyone going to arrest this thing?"

_How dare you, Sebastian. Dragon will pay for this._

"Shoot him," Gideon whispered. "Kill him, Razielle."

She didn't move.

"Do it now," he commanded.

"I can't," she whispered. "It's a death sentence. I can shoot him a few more times, then have him picked up. How does that sound, Lord Jason?"

_Baby,_ she whispered softly in Reid's mind at the same time. _Spencer, baby, are you all right? How badly are you hurt? I smell blood._

"Sounds good. Are you going to put a bullet in my agent? That's what you were hired for, isn't it?"

Gideon watched the girl in the doorway, remembering. Remembering Shekinah, and the Lord of the Kiss de Carabas, remembering a tiny child with long, chestnut curls and cat green eyes sitting on his lap as he explained what a gun was and why she should never touch one. Remembering the day she told him just what she'd become.

_I'm fine,_ Reid tried to think back at her, but he couldn't quite manage it. She glanced sharply at him, then at Gideon before looking back at Reid.

_Hold on, loverling. Hold on._

_Take care of JJ and Emily,_ he whispered.

"_Spencer se im romejul, Drol Jason._" She whispered to Gideon in a strange language, not taking her eyes off of Reid. This seemed to satisfy Gideon, who replied, "Shoot him until the clip's empty."

_BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! _

.

_Crush their unworthy idols  
No church shall bar our path  
Seductive Evil, drink your fill  
Of the bleeding Christ in your arms_

.

.

.

At last they meet. What do you guys think of that?

**Disclaimer:** I don't own anything you recognize. I own Night, Razielle, Dragon, etc.

**A/N:** I'll translate what Razielle said to Gideon some other time. The meaning isn't important, only that it involved Reid and satisfied Gideon.

**Copyright notice:** the song I used this time is the song "the Black Goddess Rises II" by Cradle of Filth.


	8. 06 Romejul

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Six  
Romejul **

.

_Love of two is one _

.

.

"So, Razielle… you found him, after all this time?" Gideon asked, watching the shaking Night Child sitting in his chair.

The others – minus Reid and JJ – were gathered around him and Razielle. Gideon stared at the pale girl covered in blood. Her hands were clenched tightly around the coffee mug full of mint raspberry tea. The fragrant steam soothed her, but it was obvious even to the most casual observer that it wasn't soothing enough. Her knuckles were white, and there was a white line around her lips. She didn't even sip the tea, just let the heat emanating from the mug warm her hands.

"You finally found him?"

"Yes…. Lord-"

"Uh-uh. None of this Lord stuff. You saved me and my agents. I figure it's enough to forget any bad memories. We're family, baby girl."

Razielle glanced up at Gideon, blinking in surprise. A tear rolled down her cheek, leaving a track in the drying blood. He knew how she felt. It had been a very long time since he'd let her call him Uncle Jason. Not since she'd become an assassin. Not since they'd fought all those years ago, when he'd thrown the peach and yellow roses he'd brought for her in the fire and left after slamming the door. But he could see past that veneer of cold indifference now, the mask she'd worn since Dragon had first approached her. Now he could see past it, and he could see the little girl he'd sat on his lap all those years ago, the little girl he'd taught to swim, taught to pitch a baseball, taught to play the piano.

"Who is this, Gideon?" Garcia whispered.

Razielle glanced at the buxom blond woman in the stylish black glasses and smiled wanly, whispering, "Jason Gideon is my uncle. He's my mother's adopted brother."

Hotch stared at her for a long time, and she turned and cast her soft, green gaze to his face. The softness vanished, leaving jagged glass behind. She bared her sharp, white teeth, hissed, "I know you. Don't think I've forgotten you, Agent Hotchner. You taught me to kill."

"I saved your life."

"Aye," she whispered, but her gaze grew no less fierce. Her lips peeled back further. "And why did my life need saving? May I remind you that your mother tried to kill me."

"Your mother attacked my sister," Hotch replied, his steely eyes desperate in their attempts to stab into her chest and pierce her bullet-shredded heart.

"Your sister attacked my father," said the preternatural huntress as she glared with slitted eyes at the head of the BAU unit. Her green eyes were like jagged emerald blades slicing at the air in front of the special agent, but he appeared unfazed by her obvious animosity towards him, and his reply was with a calm voice. Only his gaze like a sword gave him away.

"Your father attacked my sister's husband."

"Your sister's husband tried to rape me, Hotchner."

"Aye," he admitted softly. "That is why I saved you from _my_ mother, after your mother took out my sister."

"She left her alive, on purpose. Which is more than your sister planned to do to my fa-"

"Enough, you two," Gideon snapped, rubbing his temples. "That was a long time ago. Move beyond it. We have more important things to worry about now. Like why Dragon sent not one, but two assassins after the same mark. A human mark. And what we're going to tell Rossi when he gets back. We've got to explain my presence here somehow."

"Are uh, are you gonna introduce us, by the way Gideon, to this assassin?" Morgan demanded, sliding his hand across his shaved scalp. "Who exactly is she? Name, age, home town? Social security number? Work history? Anything?" The dark-skinned man eyed Razielle with something akin to mistrust, but it was too mild for that. It was as if the special agent with the mocha skin and dark eyes didn't care that she'd been hired out to murder Special Agent Reid, but only that she was covered in blood and obviously wounded, yet no questions were being asked of her.

"Razielle de Carabas du Hunter. Her age is not important, her home town is not important. She's my niece, and she's okay. She's not going to try to kill Reid again, are you, baby girl?"

"No. I couldn't if I wanted to. He's the one, Uncle Jason. He's the one." The girl shook violently, her voice soft and broken now, but she sounded so sure, so certain. "He... he is. Is he all right? Is Spencer okay?"

"Can't you feel him?" Gideon asked, wondering just how the bond of _romejulen_ worked.

Razielle shook her head, whispering, "I'm too tired. He's too tired. And we haven't bonded yet. If we had, nothing could shake it. But… please, Uncle Jason, can I go find him? Please?" On please, tears welled up in her cat green eyes.

"I'm here," a voice murmured from behind her. "Don't cry, Raze, please."

Everyone glanced up as Razielle twisted in her chair, cried out, and scrambled to her feet. Gideon was amazed. In the last half hour, Gideon had seen every shield and barrier the girl had spent most of her life building crumble, and now the agent knew just what Shekinah had meant when she'd told him that the bond of _romejulen_ made you a child again.

Reid slowly walked toward Razielle until they were inches apart, then suddenly she threw her arms around his neck, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her close.

"I'm so glad you're safe, baby," she whispered.

"Oh, Raze, you did it, you did it. Are you okay? He hurt you, I felt it," Reid whispered softly in her ear. A strand of curly, dark hair caressed his gray-tinged cheek, and he smelled her perfume – something humid and tropical. She mumbled, "I'm okay, I heal fast, are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he whispered, kissing her temple. "Just some stitches. It was a clean shot, through and through. I'll be okay."

"Um… do you two know each other?" Rossi, the man who at one point had been Gideon's replacement, asked incredulously. He'd never seen Reid more happy to see someone alive and unhurt before, not even a member of the team. Was this Reid's girlfriend? Reid didn't have a girlfriend! Who was this chick?

"Yes," Reid whispered, palming the nape of the girl's neck. "Yes, I know her. I know her."

"For how long?" Hotch demanded. He knew the truth – they had never seen each other before tonight. The agent could taste the truth and the lies on the air currents swirling around them like mini-whirlwinds. There was something here he didn't quite understand, but he had more than the vaguest inkling that his friend, Gideon, had information that the rest of them didn't.

"Seems like forever," Razielle whispered, pressing her forehead against Reid's sharp collarbones.

"Eternity." Spencer laid his cheek against her soft, dark hair.

Reid's arm around her waist was probably the only way she managed to stay on her feet in the wash of this tenderness, this warmth.

"Do you guys have to do this here?" Gideon demanded. Razielle whispered, "The longer we wait, the weaker the bond. It could cause problems. Spencer…." She stepped back, forcing his head up, and reached up to him, a flitting white butterfly against his cheek. The throbbing pain in his shoulder dimmed at the touch. He brought his own hand up to cover hers. "Spencer…."

"Razielle-"

"Just relax, Spencer. I'll keep you safe." She rose up on her tiptoes and pressed a very, very soft kiss to his lips. In that instant of intimacy, Reid felt himself being sucked into something sweet and warm and dark, and let himself go.

.

_Romeo and Juliet  
Are together in eternity _

.

Reid was a little boy again, only twelve. His father had just walked out, his mother slept upstairs, and he sat on the front porch of his house, staring into emerald green eyes framed in black fur. The panther padded toward him silently, and he gently rubbed its soft, black head. When he scratched behind its ears, she purred loudly.

"You're Razielle, aren't you?" He whispered. His voice was back to being a boyish soprano, but he didn't care. "It's you."

_Yes, Spencer. It's me._

The panther was suddenly a girl about his age, with a long, vulpine ponytail of rich, auburn and chestnut hair, and eyes as emerald as the panther's. Her lips were glossed with pale pink glitter, and pale green shadow across her eyelids like jade frost sparkled in the porch light. "It's me."

And they were both teenagers, sixteen, and her head was laying on his shoulder, and she was cuddling against him. He rested his cheek on the waves of her hair.

"Razielle… what _are_ you? I know you're not human. What are you?"

"I can't tell you. I can't explain it." She kneaded his shoulder with her fingers. He knew it was a subconscious thing, he could tell by the way she lay so relaxed in his embrace, so unresisting. Unresisting… pliant, soft, perfect….

She looked up at him, glanced for a nano-second at his mouth, then back into his eyes. "I can't tell you, I'm sorry. Because I… I don't want to scare you. Make you afraid of me."

"I'd never be afraid of you," he whispered, stroking her soft cheek with the knuckle of his index finger. "Never. I… no. Never."

He'd been about to say he loved her, and maybe he did, but he'd just met her. The first time he'd seen her had been about six hours ago, aiming a gun at the monster that had shot him, Emily, and JJ. You didn't fall in love with someone in six hours. You might be suffering from transference, but not love. He wasn't in love with her. Not her. He was in love with a lot of things – the satin softness of her skin, the thickness of her beautiful hair, the glimmering crystal quality of her eyes, the way her full, lush lips parted when she whispered his name – but not with _her_.

At least, he could pretend that it was so.

"I… Spencer, I… have you ever heard of the Children of Cat's Cradle?"

"The original _Puss-N-Boots_ legend. Most people don't know it. The story was a warning during the years of the Black Plague to stay away from black cats because people thought the cats spread the Plague. Supposedly, the cat in the story was actually a demon, and he possessed the man who eventually became the Marquis de Carabas. Then it took on the lines of the Pied Piper story. De Carabas summoned a bunch of demons, put them inside the bodies of cats, and the cats possessed their male owners, and the owners followed de Carabas into the mists of myths and legends. But supposedly, de Carabas and his men took witches for wives, and the women gave birth to children, the children born from the… Cat's Cradle…."

He stared at her in shock and recognition. "You're a Child-"

"Half. Most of the Cradle take human mates. It's the only way to make sure the cat demonics in the blood breed true. My Father didn't. He actually married. My mother is anything but human."

"Who… _what_ did he marry?" Reid asked in a soft whisper.

"The daughter of the archangel Gabrielle and the King of the Hunters."

"You're a… you're a Nephil. The child of an angel. One of the fallen. The Nephilim are where legends of vampires and werewolves came from. Nephilim were the original demons. Blood drinkers, succubi and incubi, nightmares, devils…."

Razielle hung her head, hiding behind a curtain of her hair from Reid's penetrating gaze. He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently. She glanced up at him through her curls.

"Gideon knows."

"Yes," she whispered.

"How?"

She told him. He thought about it for a while, then said, "This bond that we have. We're not bonding yet, are we? This wasn't what you meant when you said we needed to bond. What did you mean?"

"I wanted to give you the chance to back out, knowing what I am. Do you still want…."

He didn't let her finish. Cradling her face, he pressed his lips to hers, and knew exactly what it was she meant by "bond."

.

Flash of pain, so swift it was inconsequential, then bliss. Liquid gold flowing through his veins, warmth behind his eyes. Her hair was like a silken cloud around him and he could feel cool satin underneath him. His hands burrowed in her hair as her soft lips brushed his pulse, once, twice, a butterfly touch against his skin winding him tight. He felt as if his bones might snap.

"I love you," he whispered, "I love you…."

"I know," she whispered, and sank teeth deep into the artery on the side of his neck.

.

_Baby I'm your man _

.

The two of them fell to the floor in a heap of limbs. They were back in Gideon's office, Razielle was back to being covered in dried blood, and there was a stark white scar on the side of Reid's neck. He touched it wonderingly, knowing that here, in the real world, Razielle hadn't bitten him. But there was a smear of blood on her lips, and she stared at Reid in wonder, as if she'd never seen him before.

The minute they'd fallen, Gideon had thrown up his arms to keep the others back. No one could touch them until they were back on their feet. He knew the Rules of _Romejulen_ from his years with Shekinah. Any interference, and the bond could be disrupted, damaged.

"Raze…."

Reid moaned softly as he struggled to get into a position which would yield him standing on his own two feet.

"Are you hurt?" She asked Reid.

He shook his head, and got shakily to his feet. Raze hauled herself up, and stumbled into Reid's arms. He rubbed her back soothingly, pressing kisses to the top of her head. She gripped his shoulders, trying to anchor herself to the real world. Reid's kisses helped a lot.

"So… did it work?" Gideon asked softly.

"Yeah," she said. "But we're not done yet. Not by a long shot. We'd have to go to the Cradle to make it complete, but we're good for now, at least."

Gideon replied, "Good. Because I just got two phone calls. The hospital that's taking care of Reid's mother called; she's missing."

"WHAT?!" Reid yelped, jerking his head around to stare in shock at Gideon.

"And Raze, baby girl… Lilya, Morgaine, and Azrael are missing."

Razielle paled at the mention of her youngest sisters and brother. If her brother and sisters were missing, and Spencer's mother was missing….

"_Blood, Shadow, and Moonlight_!" She tore herself away from Reid, pressing her knuckles to her forehead. She took several shuddering breaths. The livid hunter was shaking violently with suppressed rage.

"Raze?" Reid whispered.

When he finally got her to meet his eyes, the unadulterated anger in them frightened him for just a moment. How could anyone feel such fury and not go mad from it? Her eyes were almost black with rage. The one word she whispered made chills run down his spine.

"Dragon."

.

_Don't fear the reaper  
Nor the wind, nor the sun, nor the rain  
Don't fear the reaper_

_._

_._

_._

So, that's chapter six. You like it? I love it. But then, I'm biased about my work. Anyway, hope you enjoyed it. I look forward to hearing from you guys about what you think about the chapter. Lemme know, okay? Lots of loves to my devoted readers!

PS – the song lyrics are from _Don't Fear the Reaper_ by Blue Oyster Cult.


	9. 07 Confrontations

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Seven  
Confrontations**

.

.

For the first time in his life, Reid refused to analyze something. The BAU agent didn't want to think about the almost supernatural bond growing quickly between himself and Razielle, a woman he barely even knew. He didn't want to deal with the questions the analytical part of him had for himself. For once, the young genius didn't think the answers were important.

Still, the questions tried to force him to announce their presence. How had he found himself in this position? How had he fallen for this strange, bloodthirsty woman so very quickly? Why did it feel as if his heart had been ripped out of his chest every time she so much as left the room? Why had his body thrilled at the pain of her teeth sinking into his throat? And why, in the name of all that was holy, had he allowed her to seal their bond even though he knew just what she was? How dangerous and potentially lethal, she was? This woman was, if she - and the evidence of his eyes could be believed - a demon. Or something like one. And yet he had let this creature bond herself to him irrevocably.

_It doesn't matter,_ he whispered to himself. He wasn't going to confront the issues if he didn't have to. He was just going to hold Razielle tight to his chest, letting the shower pound them both with steaming, hot water. He only wanted to hold her, feel her in his arms, so slender and strong, so silken soft. Her wet hair hung down her back in a dripping wet curtain. He coiled a strand of it around one finger, gave it a gentle yank.

For the last fifteen minutes, her eyes had told him her mind was far away, wandering a dark path he wasn't sure he was strong enough to trod. Spencer wanted her back with him, in the here and now, wanted her to focus on her surroundings. Her journey down that eldritch mental path filled him with a dark dread.

Razielle looked up at him, smiling. Her beauty brought the ache in his body rushing back, and he clenched his teeth, laying his cheek on top of her head to avoid looking at her. Looking at her would make it so much worse.

"Your shirt's getting wet," she whispered.

He shrugged, and the white collared shirt clung to him, both button-down shirt and undershirt soaking wet and sticking to his skin. Beads of water collected on the drenched fabric. His skin was like ice where the wet cloth touched him, but the genius ignored the chill. His pants were getting wet too, but he didn't care. Reid had stepped into the shower cubicle fully dressed, ignoring the heaviness of his clothes and cold they forced on his body. More important things had called him there.

The twenty-something agent had heard Razielle sobbing in the shower. He'd seen her huddled beneath the steaming, pounding spray, shivering, in her black leather clothes. She'd been so shell-shocked that she hadn't even bothered to take off her clothes. She'd just collapsed in the shower, tears streaming down her cheeks. Now they stood, the water pounding them like hot summer rain, and they held each other close, and Razielle tried to get somewhat clean. For some reason, the bounty hunter/assassin couldn't seem to find it in herself to completely undress. Perhaps it was the exhaustion struggling to bring her down.

Maybe it was Spencer's presence. He made her nervous.

"It has to wait," she whispered. "The rest of the bonding has to wait until we get your mother, and my brother and sisters back, and we're free to go to the Cradle"

"The Cradle?"

"It's where I grew up," Razielle murmured softly, closing her eyes and tilting her head back. Nearly scalding water pounded her skin and skimmed across her collar bones and the tops of her breasts, rolling over the leather corset. The feel of the water hitting the leather felt nice, like a massage. It eased some of the tension in her body.

"Why would Dragon take them?" Spencer asked.

Razielle glanced at him, her eyes like meadow grass in the steamy cubicle. Damp curls clung to her cheeks and neck. She almost looked completely relaxed.

Almost.

"I don't know. Moving against my family like this is an act of treason, an act of aggression against my race. It's considered an act of war - instigated by Dragon on the behalf of the Echidnae - by the Council of Seven unless Dragon is employed by someone else. And no one is stupid enough to risk my mother's wrath, she's slaughtered thousands for less," she replied, intent on scrubbing the skin over the soft swell of her breasts. The bruise began three inches above where the leather of her corset began, and spread beneath the leather and down. The ordinarily white flesh was black with bruising, but there was no bullet wound.

Her back was even worse, visible through the loose lacing of her corset that bared most of her back, almost pitch black bleeding to livid purple, blue, and red, but the gaping hole he knew had been there, the exit wound for the bullet, was gone now. In the time between being shot and making her way to the shower, the wound had closed. He'd found the bloody bullets in the bathroom sink.

He was surprised she could scrub the blood away so viciously. It had to hurt, he could feel it, almost like the feeling he got from a rug burn, but on his chest and back, and she was shielding him, he knew that, too. It had to burn viciously to her.

"I feel dirty," she whispered, catching his thoughts, and rinsed herself off under the pounding spray. The water ran into the drain in a red flood. The water cleaned the scarlet stains from the leather, as well. The huntress sighed, reveling in feeling clean for the first time since she'd taken the case against Spencer. "It was my blood, and his. I want it off. I could care less if it hurts."

For a time, there was sweet silence. Razielle scrubbed until her flesh showed pink and clear of blood beneath the pounding spray. Then she washed her hair. Not once did she acknowledge that her clothes would be ruined as soon as she got out of the shower. It didn't matter to her. What mattered was cleaning the blood and making sure Reid didn't see her naked. She just wasn't ready for that yet. And for Reid's part, he merely rubbed the lethal woman's shoulders and neck, trying to ease the painful tension he knew was there. Even when his fingers began to cramp, he kept going.

Eventually, however, he knew he had to ask the next question.

"What do we do after we get out of the shower?"

The minutes stolen in this pristine white room, with the pounding rain of the shower spray and the huge clouds of steem, seemed so inordinately precious. He didn't want to leave. It wasn't about sex - they were both fully clothed, still, and didn't have the time even if they were so inclined to do anything physical except embrace. He just wanted to stay with her always, stay with her and hold her close and never let go. It was as if the death and bloodshed waiting for them out in the world was held at bay by the warm room full of pouring rain and heat and closeness.

She caught her hair over her shoulder, and he saw how the water droplets caught on the wispy hairs at the nape of her slender neck, how when they finally were heavy enough to drop, they rolled down her back in tiny streams. He gently caressed her back, skirting the edges of that horrible, massive bruise, and she sighed, relaxing a little more.

"I don't know. It depends on what Uncle Jason decides. He technically outranks me. What he decides, I'll do, unless Mother says otherwise. I doubt she will. Uncle Jason is older than she, so she tends to listen to him because he's a better tactician and strategist, better at figuring things out."

She wrung out her hair, and the water that splashed onto the floor of the shower cubicle was bright crimson. Razielle sighed.

"What is it?" He asked softly, wiping an ineffectual finger at his eyes. The water still dripped into them.

"I hate having blood in my hair."

"You're scared, aren't you?" Reid asked with a sudden flash of insight. The shock rang in his voice. Somehow, the idea struck him as incredibly absurd, but she was holding herself so carefully, and trying to avoid the subject of her missing siblings and the waiting fight outside the bathroom. The quest to find their families was going to be hard. And despite her rather unique repertoire, Spencer could tell Razielle didn't think she had what it took to save her siblings.

She shrugged, wincing and hissing in pain as tensed and knotted muscles shrieked in protest. Instinctively, he cupped the nape of her neck and began gently massaging. He could feel a knot right at the top of her spine. It must have been killing her.

She sighed and murmured, "No. Angry. Not afraid. To hurt you, your blood, or my blood is an act of war. He won't hurt them. I won't let him. But I'm furious. I want to… do things. But I don't want to scare you."

"What will make it better?" Reid asked. He tried to keep his voice steady. The young genius had no illusions about his bravery. Generally, he didn't do well with violence. He either had nightmares, took narcotics, or cried. Sometimes a combination of the three. So if the bounty hunter in his arms was worried about scaring him, she probably had a good reason.

But... but he wanted to be someone she could confide in.

"Shooting the monster in the head," Razielle growled, anger rolling off of her in poisonous waves. "Like I did to Sebastian. Unlike the little Knight Scare, Dragon can be killed relatively easy. Or tearing him open with my bare…." She turned a little and caught a good look at the chalky pallor of Reid's face, and buried her face in his chest rather than continue with her rant and frighten him further.

**.**

Dragon was expecting Razielle to drop in and try to pull rank, try to bully him into returning her siblings and her future mother-in-law. He'd expected the frigid fury in her eyes, the gun even now pointed at his head. He expected the so-called human, Spencer Reid, Doctor with three doctorates and less than a quarter of a century to his name, to be there, looking pathetic and pale, frightened of the doings of his betters. This he expected.

He had not expected, and was thus shudderingly terrified of, the Lord Jason Gideon, the Knight Lyon, the Nephilaea's oldest brother, and her only superior in physical combat. He hadn't realized that the man leading the BAU was the man who'd killed more demons and other non-humans than even the great Michael of Heaven's Gate and the Princess Gabrielle of Darkholme combined.

If he'd known, he would've charged his employer far more money. And hired some bodyguards.

"Where are the children, and Mrs. Reid?" Lord Gideon demanded.

"I'm afraid that information is part of my client confidentiality clause, Lord Gideon. I can't give you that information."

"Then who hired you?"

"I can't give you that, either," Dragon hissed at him, eyeing the gaping maw of Jackal, Razielle's favorite gun, pointed right at his face.

Lord Gideon's gun was pressed against his right temple, where the third lobe of his brain pressed against his skull, the part of his brain that controlled automatic functions like breathing and heartbeat. Shoot him there, and by the time he regenerated, he'd be chained and at Razielle's mercy, to torture until she got the whereabouts of her siblings out of him. And the little hellcat looked close to playing Autopsy with his body - while he was still alive.

"Can't or won't?" Razielle snarled, cocking Jackal's hammer. A bullet slid into the chamber with a hard _click!_

"Oh, it's won't. He knows that." Gideon smiled almost indulgently. "Tell, or I'll give you to my niece, and when she's done, she'll give you over to her mother, and you _know_ what Shekinah will do to you."

Dragon visibly paled. No mean feat for someone with reptile skin.

"Say goodnight, lizard boy," and both Gideon and Razielle prepared to fire. The hellcat's finger began tightening on her trigger. Sweat rolled down Dragon's face. Gideon's gun clicked as the safety disengaged and his finger began to press the trigger.

"_ALL RIGHT!!!"_

Gideon leaned in, and Dragon whispered a name. Gideon's grip tightened around his gun until his knuckles turned white. Razielle glanced between him and Dragon, but when he backed off, she followed him, and escorted Reid out of the office building, guarded in back by her uncle.

This parting shot followed.

"You may have forsaken your bloodline, Lord Gideon! But it will not be denied!"

Without batting an eyelash, Gideon turned on his heel and pulled the trigger. The copper-jacketed bullet hit Dragon in the eye. The reptilian shrieks of Razielle's ex-employer followed the trio to the car and out of the parking lot.

**.**

In the car as Gideon drove back to the Vegas headquarters for the BAU, he whispered, "Raze… don't ever think that blood can't be denied. Blood can be overcome by will, by heart, by spirit, if you're strong enough. You and I are strong enough. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Uncle Jason."

"Good girl."

**.**

When the three agents came back to headquarters, they found computer-whiz Garcia throwing up in the trash can. Morgan was popping the tab on a can of Coke - his comfort drink, always a bad sign - looking visibly shaken and as pale as chocolate milk with too much milk and not enough chocolate syrup. JJ was nowhere to be seen (probably still in surgery). Emily had her head between her knees breathing hard, obviously fighting to keep from being sick, and Hotch stared fiercely at Gideon with eyes like an angry raptor.

"What happened?" Reid asked, immediately sensing both his boss's hostility towards the now retired BAU agent and the fear and horror rolling through the room like a steam locomotive.

Without even a grunted syllable or a tersely spoken word, Agent Hotchner picked up a white gift box and handed it to Gideon, who popped latex gloves on before taking it from his old - and angry - friend. The lid to the gift box was off, and the sides were stained dark brown with what was probably blood. Inside was a finger - a man's, judging by the width of the digit, the sparse but dark hair on the knuckles, and the large tiger's eye signet ring. A child's doll lay beside it, splattered with blood, and a lock of dirty blond hair was held to the toy by a bobby pin.

"The hair belongs to Mrs. Reid, forensics confirms. The doll-" Hotch began, voice hard and dark. His eyes glinted like blades.

"It's Lilya's," Razielle whispered, starting to turn very, very white. One hand found the conference table. Her knees began to buckle, but she hastily locked them and managed to remain upright. "It's my sister's."

"And…." The young genius stopped and tried to work up a mouthful of spit to wet his mouth. His breath rasped in his throat. After coughing and swallowing for a moment, and managing to collect himself, the BAU agent found the strength to speak again. "And whose finger is that?" Reid asked with some difficulty.

Razielle managed to whisper, "My father's."

.

.

.

_**Disclaimer/Author's Note:**__ don't own anything you recognize. While the mythos behind most of this is based on fairytales from the Brothers Grimm and other public domain sources - like English and Celtic legends and Jewish mysticism and such - I do try to credit my sources._

_For example, the shower scene was inspired by the second-newest James Bond movie, _Casino Royale_, which I saw on a plane to Heathrow a couple years ago._


	10. 08 Summons of the Sandman

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Eight  
The Summons of the Sandman**

**.**

**.**

_And though the paths that I have followed __  
__Have tread against the flow __  
__There is no need for sorrow __  
__For I am coming home_

**.**

"What do we do now?" Garcia asked softly, unsure what the somber Gideon or the visibly furious Hotchner would say. The ex-hacker didn't know who to ask, either. While Hotch was their leader, Gideon seemed to know more about what was going on. But maybe that was simply because the other BAU agent was telling anyone anything, whereas the retired agent was giving out piece-meal info based on the circumstances. Garcia didn't know which to turn to.

Her boss's old second-in-command didn't even look at the computer whiz. His eyes were focused on Razielle's pale, heroin washout face, her hunched battered-woman-postured shoulders, the black ink bruise on her chest from the gunshot wound, sucking lightly on a silver-steel spoon she'd pulled out of her pocket and slipped into her mouth, her left thumb hooked into the waistband of her jeans, her jagged, jutting hipbones like razorblades to slash apart reality as she leaned against the window and blended like fog and breath into the glass.

Garcia could see Reid, where he sat on a low, cheap armchair near the young, mysterious woman. He was reflected in the glass _through_ Razielle's bare midriff. The sight made the computer geek's brain throb.

The cell phone in Gideon's pocket went off, a low, eerie, whistling siren call. He flipped it open, lifted it to his ear, clicked it, and replied to some unheard prompting, "I'm here."

Razielle turned to glance at Gideon over her shoulder through the curtain of her hair.

A soft static sound from the ear piece. The humans in the room, JJ and Emily, Morgan and Garcia, shivered. Something old and eldritch hissed from that phone. They didn't understand what it was, and none of them cared.

Special Agent Hotchner eyed the phone with a fierce, almost hawkish glance. Something moved behind his eyes, something that was far more - and far less - than human, something the others had never seen before, except Gideon. Ignoring the other man, Hotch flexed his broad shoulders, but that was all he did to show his discomfort with the hissing static emanating from the cell phone.

Spencer Reid didn't take his eyes from Razielle's face.

"She's here." Gideon's reply was soft as death. Beneath the subservience and strange growling cadence of his voice was something his adopted niece alone knew was tenderness for the woman-creature he spoke to on the other end.

The shadow wraith barely held to reality that was actually Razielle became more solid as the static hissed again.

"Is that what we're doing?" Gideon asked quietly. Hotch cut his eyes to the other man, all pretenses of ignoring him gone. He, too, could hear what the woman on the other line was saying to the ex-BAU agent. Gideon went on, "Are you sure?"

Crackling from the phone.

Razielle's eyes widened to become large cat jewels in the strange misted darkness that only surrounded her as she _blended_ with the window. The hairs on the nape of her neck prickled sharply, and her skin crawled. Something in her belly rolled and rumbled. The huntress put one hand to it, trying to will it calm. It didn't work.

"You got it," Gideon spoke gently to the other end, and hung up the phone.

The dark-haired huntress pulled herself out of the icy embrace of the window's existence and became real flesh, warm blood, rippling muscle, and ivory-bladed bone again. She locked her emerald eyes with Gideon's, just barely challenging him. Was he really going to suggest what she thought he was going to suggest?

"We've been called to check out a crime scene," her uncle said to her, and to the others. "We've got a fresh body, looks like a serial killer."

"That was the higher ups?" Hotch said.

Something about that soft and fuzzing static had carved into his veins with tiny knives of ice and frozen his blood and his breath. That static told him that for this case, if a case it was, Gideon was top man, the man in charge, and _he,_ Hotchner, was second in command. He also knew who the new top man had been speaking to, and the BAU agent's blood simmered in his veins at the thought of taking _her_ orders.

"No," Razielle whispered. She looked at Reid and tilted her head, like a kitten or a small bird. Her eyes glittered, and when she pulled the bowl of the spoon out of her mouth, everyone saw it had been warped and twisted into a sharp, thin, jagged, glistening needle. She tucked it behind her ear, the point buried in her hair.

"No?" Hotchner echoed. "No? Can we have a little more than that, Razielle?"

Razielle sighed and glanced at Gideon before locking eyes with Hotchner. The man in front of her was really starting to irritate her.

"That was my mother. We're being called to the Cradle, across the stinging river of bliss and the sweet divine dust of ecstasy, over the bridge and past. We're going home. Which means," she said, and pulled the spoon-made-needle out from behind her ear again, "we need a ride."

And she dragged the jagged edge of it down the pane of glass her body had mingled with before, filling the air with a blood-burning, bone-aching, teeth-grinding screech like a tortured cat, a summoning for a creature that obeyed only her call.

She smiled as she stared out the window into the darkness of the night.

**.**

_The cat's in the cradle __  
__And the silver spoon…. _

_We were needle and spoon…. _

_How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? _

**.**

The Car moved through the burnt-amber Vegas night, a sleek black jungle cat, a jaguar or a panther, a shadow predator prowling streets, preying on the flesh and blood demons of the surrounding concrete and glass and neon hell. Wheels pristine and untouched by dirt, dust, or oil rolled down asphalt streets, leaving smoking tar in its wake. The Car zoomed through Las Vegas, searching... searching.

No one drove it. No creature, mortal or otherwise, sat behind its pristine, black leather steering wheel, or pressed their foot to the black pedals to rev its engine or burn the fuel that smelled of rotten eggs, sulfur, and boiling blood. Music played softly on the sports car's radio, spilling like blood from the dark pores of the speakers:

_All this time I've been so hollow, __  
__Inside… __  
__I know you're still there…. _

A soft, shrill sound, the clear ringing of a silver trumpet and the mewling cry of a newborn kitten calling for its mother, a witch's fingertip circling the rim of a glass full of candy-apple red poison, the wind singing through juniper leaves and rose briars, nails dragging down a chalk board, the screech of a cat being skinned alive, a master's summoning, hit the evanescent black steel frame of the car, and struck a chord that shivered through it, called up the yearning in it, summoned it.

The music from the speakers whispered to the caller, the caster of the summons:

_Hunting you, __  
__I can smell you… __  
__Your life…._

The sweet scent of fresh blood and burning gunpowder and leather and icy darkness made the engine throb beneath the shiny hood of the demon thing that took the shape of the Millennial Jaguar, that scent that was more than smell and less than soul. The sound of a gentle, liquid drumming, slow and fierce and strange, filled the car until the very windows rattled with it, and the engine screamed with joy.

_Your heart pounding in my head!!!_

It raced to find its mistress and answer the summons, Razielle's heartbeat calling it, driving it onward, leading it through the night.

**.**

_He who makes a beast out of himself  
Gets rid of the pain of being a man…. _

_The sand is singing deathless words to me…. _

**.**

"Is the Car coming?" Gideon demanded suddenly, almost angrily, after the shriek of the tormented glass had died away into sepulchral silence.

Everyone turned to stare at him, at the man who stood with his eyes closed, his fingertips pressed to the bridge of his nose… everyone, that is, except Razielle, who thunked her head against the window with its one long scratch, and breathed a soft breath against it. Mist crawled from her mouth to mate with the glass pane. Tension crawled up her spine to sink claws into her back, shoulders, and neck.

She could feel the Beast rising in him, that part of him that made him not human. But why? She could almost taste a faint ringing in the air, like a note of sound or song, too high or too low for anyone to detect. Anyone, that is, except for the Beast inside Jason Gideon… but what note could the Beast hear, that she could not?

"It may be night, but with these cat's eyes I still see light," she said softly, "and thus I can see breath, and air, as well as Heaven's ire. But only the Fallen can hear the singing of light and breath and liquid fire." Finally, she turned her eyes to Gideon. "What do you hear, Uncle Jason? What do you hear that I cannot see or smell? What is it?"

"Your mother summoned us," Gideon told Razielle, and did not add, _With a phone call that made mortal blood shriek within the vein._

"This is so," she murmured, cocking her head like a curious kitten. Her jade glass eyes glinted dangerously in the dimly lit room. There was something here that her uncle was sensing, and yet it was slipping past her. "What of it?"

"You summoned the Car," the retired BAU agent added, with the silent words, _With the screeching needle slicing down the glass._ Razielle nodded to him, and he sucked in a deep breath before demanding sharply, "But who summoned the Beast? Who howled to the moon and challenged the demon?"

_Who indeed,_ the Night Child wondered, pressing her fingers to the glass as frost crystals climbed upwards from the bottom of the window, a filigreed cage of ice. Who could shriek to the Hunter Moon and summon the demon in Gideon, when she, the cat-demon daughter of Hunters and Nephilaea, couldn't hear it?

**.**

_Say your prayers, little one __  
__Don't forget, my son __  
__To include everyone… _

_Till the Sandman, he comes… _

_Dreams of war, dreams of liars, __  
__Dreams of dragons' fire…._

**.**

Dreaming Caligula let the vengeful, furious, agonized, joyous, malevolent howl of challenge and death fade from his thick, white throat so like a giant worm's. The dream demon grinned and stared at the giant building of concrete and iron. A pathetic defense against the Son of Morpheus, eldest of the dream demons. Night was his time, didn't they understand? His turf in this gang war of the mortal psyche's inner archetypes brought to life and into war against the old tales that were true.

And he could smell the Knight Lyon, the Prince of the Fiery Wings, the Great Beast with cloven hooves and pieces of a shattered halo blinding one eye to lock him by his imperfection into semi-mortal form….

Throwing back his head, blood auburn hair blowing in the wind that did not exist anywhere but in dreams - oh but that was all one of the four sons of Morpheus needed - Caligula shrieked to the dark sky, the silencing scream, the screeching siren that bound the tongues of mortals as they slept and kept their pleas for help from the monsters locked tight behind their puny, bite-less teeth. He screamed to the heavens, daring any of the Nephilaea or the Fallen to come and try to stop him. The Dream Prince knew they could not.

Inside, he felt his prey shudder, and the Beast in the Shell rise up and begin to claw its way out, as the Lady of the Kiss, the daughter of the Hunter, turned her night eyes upon him through the window glass. He could see the emerald knives glinting like deadly stars in the darkness. Her gaze held a promise of death. But even one such as she could not truly kill one of the Four Sons of Morpheus.

"Sandman comes, children," Dreaming Caligula hissed, the sound of a closet door creaking open in the dark as the gremlins slithered out to eat the babes asleep in their beds. "I come... and you will all die."

Somewhere off in the distance, he smelled smoke and melted cinderblocks, and tasted cooking flesh on the back of his tongue.

**.**

_Forever __  
__Shall the wolf in me __  
__Desire the sheep in you…. _

_I'll be upon you by the moonlight…  
High blood drumming on my skin, it's so tight…. _

_Hear the hissing now on the breeze  
As through the plundered groves of the carnal garden  
Fresh horrors blow…. _

**.**

"Guns! Draw your guns!" Gideon yelled, at the same moment that Razielle cried, "Sandman!" Her voice was a yowl like a she-cat attacking with bared teeth and raking claws, as she stabbed at the glass with the needle-that-was-a-spoon. "Sandman! Curse it, _Sandman_! Uncle Jason, Dreaming Caligula is _here_!"

Hotch and the others, minus Garcia, drew their guns, but Gideon's sudden shout of agony drew their attention as he doubled up and fell to the floor, wheezing, gasping, pounding his fist against the floor. His bloodshot eyes snapped open, and he pinned Razielle with his gaze. The huntress shoved away from the window to Gideon's side. For the first time since her uncle had shot Dragon in the head, a slither of fear found its way inside her.

"Uncle Jason?" Her voice was tremulous.

"Get them out, Razielle!" His voice was an infernal snarl.

"Uncle Jason!"

"The Beast," he growled, and something rough in his voice brought demons cackling and howling just outside a ring of light to mind. Demons waiting to devour anyone who strayed outside the circle of saving grace, of protecting light. His teeth itched as they sharpened, and his face flushed with the effort to control the part of him raking at the inside of his belly, his chest, clawing its way up into his throat so that when he opened his mouth to order her, she could see its muzzle and its hungry teeth in the back of his throat. "It must rise to the challenge… but Caligula will kill Reid if he can! That's what they want, to kill Reid! Get him and everyone else out now! Get them _out_!"

She nodded sharply, turned to shout an order, and jerked, gasped, her hands flying to her throat, a mirror of Reid's hands, and they both fell to the floor, choking on something glistening, bright steel sharp, protruding from Reid's throat and someone in the building began to yell, "Fire! Fire!"

Darkness slammed into Razielle's brain as the alarm went off and Gideon roared in fury and pain.

**.**

_Caught here in a fiery blaze... _

_And trouble is comin', __  
__It's just the high cost of lovin'…. _

**.**

**.**

**.**

**Author's Note:** Don't own anything you recognize, of course. Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams. There actually is no such thing as a Nephilaea - it's Nephil or Nephilim. But these aren't quite the same thing, so I changed the name. And the four sons of Morpheus are Caligula, Tiberius, Nero, and Claudius - four of Rome's Caesars. If I remember right, three of them were nutso.

**Copyright Information:**

The first segment of lyrics is from _Return (I Am Coming Home)_ by the Cruxshadows

The second segment is three different songs. The first two lines are from a song that I don't really remember, but I remember the lines _"the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon... little boy blue and the man in the moon."_ I think it's from the seventies. Line three is from _Nymphetamine_ by Cradle of Filth, and the last line is from _the Matrix_.

The song playing in the Car is _Haunted_ by Evanescence

Section three of the lyrics is from _The Beast and the Harlot_ by Avenged Sevenfold... or is it _Bat Country_ by Avenged Sevenfold? Someone check for me?

Section four is _Enter Sandman_ Metallica

Section five has three songs: _Beauty and the Beast_ by Nightwish, and two that I don't remember but I didn't come up with the lyrics

" Caught here in a fiery blaze..." is by Avenged Sevenfold from one of the two songs mentioned previously but I can't remember which one

The last two lines of lyrics are from _Temptation_. I've only heard the cover by Cradle of Filth, not the original song, and don't know who did it originally.


	11. 09 Rise of the Beast

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Nine  
Rise of the Beast**

**.**

**.**

_Hush little baby, don't say a word  
And never mind that noise you heard  
Its just the beast under your bed,  
In your closet, in your head _

**.**

Jason Gideon, retired BAU agent posing for more than fifty years as a human, gritted his teeth as the Beast crawled through him, dragging claws and gnawing with serrated, knife-sharp teeth. Heat like hell's black flames licked at the inside of his skin, at every shred of muscle and sinew, as if the devil burrowed beneath his flesh to feast on muscle and bone, gnawing away, legions of man eating rats feasting inside him. He swallowed the screams of pain and blood lust that rose in his throat, and snarled when Hotchner tried to touch him.

"Get away!" Gideon growled, his voice bestial and enraged.

"Gideon-" Hotch began, glancing over his shoulder at Razielle and Reid where they lay on the floor, gasping for breath. "Gideon, you have to stop the shift."

"The Challenge must be answered," Gideon snarled, and a trickle of something black and salty dribbled out of his mouth. Blood? He wasn't sure, and neither was Hotch. "He has challenged me, and I must answer. They will kill everyone here if I don't answer them... get away, Aaron."

"But-" And Hotchner put one hand on Gideon's shoulder. The swipe from Gideon's pale, shaking hand scored four bloody furrows in the BAU agent's forearm. "Ah!"

"Get back!"

"Don't touch him, Hotch," Morgan cried, kneeling over the two fallen. "Help me with Reid and Razielle!"

But by the time the senior agent had managed to wrench his eyes away from the sight of Gideon's rippling flesh, as if carnivorous mermaids swam inside him, the Night Child had already rolled herself onto her side and ripped the silvery dart from Reid's throat, and both could breathe almost normally. The pinprick of the needle was nearly invisible, but Reid's blood was burning in his veins.

"Reid!" Garcia sobbed as the younger man twisted and writhed in pain. "Reid, Reid… Hotch, do something! He's dying!"

"I can't-" He began to protest, but Razielle shoved him aside.

"Get out of my way, you idiot!" The furious huntress shoved her tumbling dark curls out of her face and stabbed herself with the needle-from-the-spoon in the tip of her index finger. Dark ruby liquid welled up. She acted instantly, smearing the dark blood rolling down her finger over her _romejul_'s lips.

"Lick your lips. Come on. Spencer? Spencer! Spencer, lick your lips!"

He did, a spasmodic jerking of his tongue over his soft mouth even as he moaned in the grips of whatever had been on the needle once embedded in his throat. Razielle felt her eyes burning, but she refused to shed tears. Not yet. The Night Child would not allow Reid to die, not when she'd only just found him. She couldn't heal him, but her blood could act as temporary relief from the poison. It would buy them... perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. He would be in pain, he would suffer horribly, but it would keep him from surrendering to the pain and dying. No one with Hunter blood in their veins could surrender so easily to Death.

Razielle inhaled sharply at the scent of smoke and cooking meat. Cooking meat in a burning building meant one thing - dead humans.

"Razielle!"

She jerked her head around to look at her Uncle Jason, who groaned as the flesh of his fingertips split down to his palms. Blood dripped steadily onto the floor, pooling around his prostrate form. Eyes like cavernous pits pinned her.

"Uncle Jason...." She whispered softly, awestruck. The huntress had never seen him shift before into the Beast.

"Get them to the Car!"

"I can't!" She yelled, frustration filling her with near-panic. Biting her lip, she tried to get her arms under Reid's twitching body. "The Car isn't here yet!"

"Where is it?!" Gideon demanded, his voice roughening and roiling with fury until the preternatural huntress felt the psychic fur beneath her flesh bristling in response to the Beast struggling to get out of him. The Night Child growled at him, and Gideon roared, "_Where_ is the _Car_?"

"On its way, that's all I know! Shift, Uncle Jason!" Razielle added, getting Reid into her shaking arms. If Morgan hadn't been helping, she probably would've dropped the convulsing genius. Desperation tinged Razielle's voice as she cried, "Please! We need you! Hurry up!"

Gideon roared as his sternum cracked in half lengthwise and his ribcage split open, ripping the flesh of his torso in a messy seam down the center, from collar to groin. Something wet and snarling and far too large was trying to crawl out of the mess of his guts.

Garcia screamed. Morgan and Hotch gaped in horror. Then something very big and very, very bad wrenched their attention away from the bleeding man.

Something large, with four massive feet a third the size of Buicks, and standing over seven feet tall at the shoulder slammed through the door to the office and roared. It was not the Car, it was not Gideon's Beast, and it was most definitely not a good thing.

Razielle leapt to her feet, growling like an angry cat, her eyes slitting and beginning to glow a toxic green as Dreaming Nero, one of the four sons of the King of Slumber, stepped across the threshold of the great room, snarling, glistening ropes of saliva dripping from his muzzle, his delirious eyes like oil spills on puddles of water swirling in his face as he stalked toward her.

The huntress glanced at her Uncle, still in the throes of his shift. No help, not yet.

The flesh of Gideon's ravaged body continued to split open as the thing inside him struggled for freedom… and vengeance.

**.**

_Hunting you __  
__I can smell you __  
__Your life __  
__Your heart pounding in my head _

**.**

The Car barreled through another red light, straight past a squad car in the next lane, unobserved, unnoticed, cloaked in the essence of the night.

It couldn't smell, not like a human or a Night Child or a hound could, but it could smell in its own way, and right now it smelled the blood of the Knight Lyon, Lord Jason Gideon of Ratchet-Upon-the-Sand, and the scent of two of the Princes of the Dream Demons - Dreaming Nero, that mad, mad thing whelped by a Night Mare, and Dreaming Caligula, madder than Nero, the incestuous offspring of Morpheus the King and his mindless zombie of a daughter, Camille de Lyrium.

And the third Dream Demon Prince, Dreaming Tiberius, he too was coming, the Car could actually _See_ him as he slashed his way through the humans of Vegas, cutting them down invisibly as he passed, a whirlwind of death and blood. It was almost like a neck-and-neck race between the creature of living metal and the demon slicing through the ranks of men.

The Car felt that shatter-glass-kitten tone again, caressing its black steel frame, and knew its Mistress was getting increasingly desperate for its appearance. She needed it. She was in danger, the Night Child. Razielle called for it.

The Car's speedometer needle jumped from 60 to 90, and it slipped through the streets of Vegas like a lightning fish.

**.**

_My blood runs with the beasts  
Though no crescent, cross  
Or wandering star  
Shalt witness my defeat  
Born of jackal in the Vatican_

**.**

The Beast, wet and slick with Its birthing fluids - the blood and gore of Its host, whose corpse even now cooled in the night - crept through the flickering shadows cast by the blazing veils of hellish fiery dancers, slipped like a serpent between the dancing flames, intent on the Interloper.

Its eyes did not blaze as the Interloper's did, that intruder into the territory of the Beast with the wings un-grown, so It could prowl through sights and sounds and reality unknown. It crept forward on silent feet, massive paws of ragged black fur and retractable claws the size of daggers. The pads of Its feet brushed silently against the linoleum floor. Unlike the Interloper, the Beast did not pant heavily or drool ropes of toxic saliva. It simply padded through the shadows, intent on destroying Its enemy.

The kitten-child, the winged one's daughter, she stood between the Interloper and the Beast's own Pack. Oh, the Pack, the Beast's mortal children... and the three who were not so mortal… the Hawking, and the kitten-child, and her other half. No, not so mortal, that other half. The Beast had always known, even when shackled by Its pretend-mortal shell of flesh.

The Interloper tensed, and the Beast hunched down, readying to spring. Blood was calling, blood was begging for the Beast to drink, and especially the blood of the Interloper, whispering in the veins of the creature as it slowly stalked nearer to the kitten-child and the rest of the Pack. This monstrous beast had issued a challenge, and the Beast would answer - with claws, and fangs, and rivers of blood.

Dreaming Nero, with the eyes of fever and madness, crept toward Razielle, and then Razielle said the words, the words that made the Beast remember, and It watched and waited for the moment when It could leap upon the Interloper, and with Its jackal jaws rip the creature's throat out.

**.**

"Am I going to die, Garcia?" Reid whispered.

The flames were spreading, had already created a fiery gateway across the shattered and splintered doorway, but the creature between them and the portal to that mini-hell kept them in the room as smoke began to pour inside. Soon they would all suffocate.

The weeping woman shook her head and smoothed back Reid's hair, murmuring softly, "No, no, baby, no. You're not going to die. Razielle's not going to let anything happen to you, nothing. Not a thing."

"I feel like I'm dying," he mumbled.

"You're not dying, Spencer," Razielle said without turning to look at him. She kept her eyes focused on the furred creature stalking towards them. "Not yet, anyway. I bought you some time. Now I've just got to take care of Dreaming Nero."

_You couldn't 'take care' of me if your life depended on it, whelp of the Hunter._

Everyone in the room heard Nero's voice, a hissing sibilance echoing like dry bones in the mind, and stared at the snarling, gimlet-eyed creature with wide horrified eyes. Everyone except Reid, convulsing with poison, and the stalking Beast, and Razielle.

The Night Child spread her feet and twisted her fingers, and the air between them began to shimmer. She turned her head only once to look at Reid, because it was what Nero expected and allowed. But she caught a glimpse of Gideon's corpse - for nothing resided in the torn and bloodied flesh any longer. Scraps of muscle and skin, cracked and broken bones, lay in a spreading pool of blood.

The Beast had vanished.

"I am Razielle, daughter of Shekinah of the Hunters and the Marquis de Carabas," she said, squaring her shoulders. Something shimmered in her hand, but no one could tell what that something was. It had no clear shape, no definition, no play of light to give it substance. But her long, claw tipped fingers curled around this shimmering thing with a surety that bespoke years of use.

"I am Heir to the Cradle," she added, "the Lady Gryphon, Spawn of the Hunter King's Daughter, Child of the Night."

She flexed, and the shimmering thing extended down from her clutching hand and down, till the end of it just brushed the ground.

"I am _romjule_ to Spencer Reid, eternal esquire to the Broken Halo, ally of the Cobalt Hawking." She brought the shimmering thing up to shoulder height, hefted it and swung it once around until it rested in her clenched fist, the handle held before her face, the length of it raised in defense.

_Spare me the titles, Razielle._

"I _was_ Dragon's Claw, the Devil's Assassin," the huntress growled from between clenched teeth, eyes narrowed, slitted like a cat's. Jade gaze glinting like knives, she continued, "I am the patron saint of murderers. I am slayer to the oath breakers, and the Shatterer of Dreamers and Dreams."

_How dare you!_

With a thunderous roar, Dreaming Nero leapt at her as a vicious snarl filled the room, and a shadow sprung from the flickering darkness cast by the spreading flames, tackling the monstrous Dream Demon Prince and bringing it to the ground.

"What the-" Hotch began, eyes wide and, for a moment, glinting ice blue and vertical, like a hawk's.

Razielle, Night Child, preternatural huntress and assassin, swung her glittering blade so that the glass-sharp edge bit deep into Dreaming Nero's heaving side. As blood sprayed, Razielle cried, "Go for the throat, Uncle Jason!"

**.**

_When contrary winds blow across the sands  
Their murmurs can be easily swayed  
But when storms quicken one cannot placate  
The howling of their murderous rages _

_Winged seraphim hold love's trembling hand  
Beside our waiting graves  
As war roars about our precious land… _

_Tonight in flames!_

**.**

**.**

**.**

**Disclaimers:** I don't own anything you recognize.

**Copyright stuff:**

Section one: this is Enter Sandman again.

Section two: Haunted by Evanescence

Section three: something from Cradle of Filth - don't remember the title

Section four: Tonight in Flames by Cradle of Filth


	12. 10 The Beast Falls

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Ten  
The Beast Falls**

**.**

**.**

_He who makes a beast out of himself  
Gets rid of the pain of being a man...._

_In the city of wonder  
Ain't gonna play nice  
Watch out  
You might just go under...._

.

The Beast raged and snarled as Its jaws clamped down on Dreaming Nero's throat. Hot stinging blood like acid gushed forth into Its mouth, burning Its muzzle and tongue, but the Beast did not release its prey. It would _not_ release its prey until the Prince of the Dream Demons lay dying in his own fluids upon the floor.

The she-kitten snarled and shrieked, baring her small but needle-sharp teeth at Nero as well. With a yowling cry, she stabbed at the Interloper with her cold magic long-tooth - a sword, part of It vaguely remembered, a sword forged of silver and hidden by demon magic - that was held tight in her slender paw. But Dreaming Nero rolled his body, his mouth still firmly wrapped around the Beast's throat, and kicked out with one heavily muscled back leg, slamming his great paw - the size of an average desk chair - into Razielle's already bruised chest, smashing into her ribcage with nearly crushing force and driving her back so that she hit the glass window. Her head collided with the window pane with a solid _thunk_! She cried out, her eyes rolled up in her head, and the huntress slid unconscious to the floor.

"Razielle!"

That was Reid, one of the Beast's Pack. He was the one whose scent carried the taste of the growing season and life, and something more than mortality. The young genius crawled and dragged himself to the side of the oblivious assassin. Garcia, who had held Reid while he convulsed and sweated, now sat hunched against the far wall. She kept her hands clapped over her mouth. Tears streaked her cheeks. Reid, ignoring the computer whiz and even the battle between the roaring behemoths, struggled to get Razielle in his arms. One he had her, he cradled her as close to her chest as he could, whispering her name.

She did not move.

The Beast first glimpsed the girl lying in Reid's arms, and then a haze of vicious red descended over Its eyes. With a bellowing bull of a roar, the ancient monster swiped with one great, clawed fist at the Interloper's jaw, trying to shatter the bone and stop his crushing bite. Dreaming Nero leapt upon his enemy and slammed the Beast into the ground, tried to bite, sink his teeth into Its throat.

_BANG!!_

Nero roared in agony as the bullet ripped through his flank, but did not turn to stare at the creature - not a human, not by that smell, the smell of wind and sunlight and mountain air and cold mountain lakes. He could not turn away from the snarling jaws of his foe, or his throat would be ripped out in a fountain of gushing crimson. He snarled and yanked and tore, shredding fur and belly flesh with his hind claws, gnawing and biting with his sharp teeth. The Beast within his jaws roared with pain.

_BANG!!_

The Beast snarled in fierce satisfaction as the Interloper roared again. Another bullet found his chest. Why did the winged one not shoot Dreaming Nero directly in the head? The little tooth that bit with flame and death could burrow into the Interloper's brain and finish him off before he managed to get his claws too deeply in the Beast's heart.

Ah, but this was ritual combat, a challenge. No, not a challenge, but a Challenge. Death could not be administered by anyone except the Beast Itself. Pain, yes, from one who had the authority, but not death.

Tasting acid blood on Its tongue, Its own and the Interloper's, the Beast suddenly snapped Its teeth, changing Its grip, and clamped Its jaws around Nero's lower jaw, and jerked Its head back, ripping through flesh and muscle and sinew and bone, so that blood sprayed, drenching Its muzzle just as something sharp and burning pierced Its side.

.

_A disease of the mind  
It can control you  
I feel like a monster_

.

The Beast heard a shriek, and rolled one gimlet eye to see the she-kitten struggling to her feet as she cried, "Caligula! Dreaming Caligula, oath-breaker, monster!" She grabbed the shimmering sharp thing where it had dropped to the floor when she'd fallen, and the daughter of demons snarled, baring teeth that even as the others watched, lengthened and sharpened until they resembled the teeth of a wild cat.

"The Beast is mine!"

Ah, the voice of Dreaming Caligula. It was _his_ arrow in the Beast's side, allowing hot, scarlet life to pour forth from Its flank. The second-eldest Dream Prince snarled and panted, anxious to lap up that blood. But he kept his eye on Shekinah's daughter as well, at her bared teeth and sharp claws. Those teeth, deceptively small, could rip out his throat if she managed to get close enough.

"Over my dead body!"

Razielle snarled, lips peeled back in a grimace, and she darted forward like a pouncing kitten, eyes burning with fury, claws popped. The huntress wrenched her jaws wide to bite.

She darted past the Beast. The ancient creature that had once been trapped in a seemingly mortal form felt Its attention pulled towards the huntress. It would have paid more attention to the she-kitten, but at just that moment, It felt the Interloper's bottom jaw purposely loosen and the demonic monster's huge hind feet impact the Beast's broad chest with enough fury and force to crack Its ribs.

The Beast that was once the BAU agent known as Jason Gideon hit the floor with bone crunching force, and before It could even think of rising to Its feet, Dreaming Nero was upon It, ravaging with tooth and claw and poisoned spittle.

**.**

_The fire of my soul rejects my wisdom  
'Cause all you do in life comes back to you...  
I can feel it...  
Tired, trembling  
I am descending...._

**.**

Razielle lifted her blade - for blade it was - and darted into the middle of the battle between her uncle and Dreaming Nero and the interfering Dreaming Caligula.

How many of the Four Dreamers were against them? Did the homicidally mad Dreaming Tiberius race to do battle with them as well? They could never fight the three mad sons of Morpheus, and to kill all of the insane princes would surely bring the Demon Prince, Claudius, to investigate - and Claudius, though just and sane, was still a dangerous enemy to have, and to kill all three of his male siblings would make him anyone's enemy. And even the daughter of the Marquis de Carabas and Shekinah, daughter of the Hunter King, would die in a battle against even one Dream Prince.

_You wanna live forever?_ Razielle asked herself, quoting her favorite movie, and launched herself at Dreaming Caligula as heat and rage pounded through her body.

"I'm going to kill you, little kitten, daughter of the Hunter's Heir," Dreaming Caligula whispered. His eyes were hollows of black madness. Razielle felt ice steal through her body and tried to fight it off. The Prince continued, "Yes, kill you. You and your tom cat over there, the little Fae lordling."

The words dipped in frigid hate stopped the frantically struggling huntress cold for a very long moment, and she whispered, shocked, "What?"

"I thought as much," Caligula hissed. Where his spittle touched her face, Razielle's skin went numb. Fear began creeping up her spin, but she could do nothing, pinned by the Dream Demon's weight, words, and the heavy, black gaze that held so many secrets and haunted whispers and dreams. The huntress's heart began to pound. "So Dragon was right," the demon continued, eyes boring into Razielle. "You really don't know what he is." He cackled, and the assassin resisted the urge to look into his gaping maw, down his throat into the well of darkness waiting there. "Well," he said. "No matter. You'll both be dead soon enough. The poison in your _romejul_ will surely slow you down, for your bond is so strong. It will be child's play to kill you. But first," and before she could react, the deranged Dream Demon tossed back his mane of wild, black hair and lifted his crossbow, firing a quarrel right past her ear, so that the fletching drew a drop of blood before the bolt sank into the flank of the Beast, who roared in agony.

"Coward!"

She hissed like an angry cat, practically spitting the insult, and launched herself at him with a shrieking battle cry, snarling and slashing with claw and blade. If she were lucky, and Hotchner were smart, then the others - Reid included - would all be able to get out of the burning building before it all went up in flames. Already the red dancers that devoured everything were licking up the sides of the concrete walls, and thick smoke was filling the room.

Caligula shot her in the chest, a bolt straight through her heart, but it wasn't silver, and it didn't stop or slow her. She fell upon him with claws unsheathed, raking her claws down his face as he screamed.

The sound of shattering glass and crumbling concrete made her turn her head, as something black and sleek and shining plowed through the large window she'd been leaning against not even twenty minutes ago.

_Mistress! _

The winded Night Child struggled to get back up, but Dreaming Caligula grabbed her thick, long hair and hauled at it hard, making the huntress scream, yanking her back down. Her face smacked into the hot tile. Stars danced with the spots across her vision. She was fighting to wrench her hair from the Dream Prince's grip when suddenly-

_BANG!_

She looked up and blinked in surprise as the grip on her hair relaxed and fell away. Spencer half-lay, half-knelt, there on the hot linoleum, his gun drawn, his entire body shaking in pain and with fatigue. His hands shook violently, and the leg he held himself up with tried to buckle, but he didn't fall and didn't relax his grip on his weapon.

Razielle got to her feet, and as one they turned and watched the battle between the Beast and Dreaming Nero.

**.**

_Angels on the sidelines baffled and confused....  
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey...._

.

It was almost terrifying in the furious heat of battle. The Beast groaned and snarled, the world swimming in swirls of gray before Its eyes, as Its grip began to loosen. Nero's venom-slick needle teeth were plunged deep into the meat of the Beast's shoulder and did not slip free. The Beast's hyena-strong jaws were clamped as tight as It could get them around the Interloper's wet, matted throat. Blood poured from ragged bites, from deep scratches and gaping cuts, and from the numerous wounds in their sides from bullets and crossbow bolts.

For one moment, the Beast considered giving up on the brutal. It was an old, ancient creature, tired and gray in Its soul, Its will exhausted from living for countless centuries and suffering countless sorrows. The pain ripping through Its huge, furred body was great. For just a moment, It considered letting it all go… and then the cry of the she-kitten caught Its attention.

"Don't give up, Uncle Jason! Fight! Fight him! _Fight!_"

_Is that all you have, pathetic creature? You, the Broken Halo, King of the Ratchet-Upon-the-Sand? Is this all? Is this all that you can give me? Well? Is it?!_

Something snapped within the ancient creature of legend, and the once-human Beast roared in vicious, dark fury and suddenly sank Its shark-like teeth deep into flesh and wrenched Its head back, ripping out the jugular in a spurting gush of dark blood. Dreaming Nero, of the Four Princes of the Dream Demons, gurgled in the mess of his throat and fell to the ground.

He did not get up again.

The Car - which has slammed through the nearly ceiling height, bullet-proof window to the wind-chime tinkling of jagged, broken glass - revved its hellish engine to catch the Beast's attention, but the great Beast did not move for a very, very long moment. Finally, all It did was sink to Its belly upon the ground, gasping and panting for breath. With a weary sigh, It lowered Its massive head to rest upon gargantuan paws, and It did not move.

.

_Bright eyes, burning like fire  
Bright eyes, how can they close and fail?  
How can the light that burned so brightly  
Suddenly burn so pale?  
Bright eyes...._

**.**

**.**

**.**

**Author's Note: **so this chapter is also in the 2000+ range. I tried to make the fight breathtaking and edge-of-your-seat. Did it work? Oh, and cyber cookie for anyone who can figure out who the heck the Winged One is, the person that shot Nero.

**Copyright Info:**

First section, lines 1-2: Avenged Sevenfold

Section 1, remaining lines, and section 2: _Disturbia_, by Rihanna

Section 3: _Karma_, by Kamelot

The quote Razielle makes is from _Conan the Barbarian_; Valeria says it

Section 4: _Right in 2_ by Tool

Last section: _Bright Eyes_, by Simon and Garfunkel


	13. 11 The Journey Begins

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Eleven  
The Journey Begins**

_._

_._

_Do you hear the cat within the box?_

_Let me rest in peace  
Let me get some sleep....  
So let me rest in peace...._

**.**

The Beast lay upon the floor, not moving. The agents of the Behavioral Analysis Unit who worked alongside the man known as Jason Gideon stared at the great, bleeding creature upon the floor. Like a wolf, or a panther, or a deer… some strange primordial thing melted into a great brew of fauna.

Its eyes were half-lidded, gleaming the color of an arctic wolf's but slit like a great cat's, glazed with exhaustion. Its mouth, like that of a great horse, bristled with jagged white teeth like a shark's. Its fur, like a shaggy grizzly bear, yet dark as pitch, was matted and wet. Its paws, great huge paws like a polar bear's, flexed, and in that strange, half-dead twitching, the talons of a flesh-eating vulture retracted and flashed out again, like the claws of a panther or a lion. The body of a small elephant, with the wide head of a boarhound, yet twisted with the supple grace of a great hunting cat, heaved up and down as the Beast struggled to breathe through Its snout that resembled a fat, tusked boar's.

Blood, dripping down Its sides like gushing crimson, splattered the white linoleum, so very much like the tears streaming unchecked down Razielle's ashen face.

"Uncle Jason?" She whispered, slowly creeping toward the Beast. As exhausted as the creature was, It could mistakenly think she was a threat, and lash out at her, gore her with Its tusks or rip her to shreds with Its great teeth. As quick of a healer as the cat demon was, she didn't think she could survive a mauling from such an ancient, legendary beast. "Uncle Jason?" The Night Child tried again. The creature did not move. "Please, get up," she added, a quiver shaking her voice.

The Car's engine purred like a contented cat, trying to get her attention. She glanced at it from the corner of her eye, then flicked an eye back to the snarling flames and said, "Hotchner. Get everyone into the car. Now."

The hawkish man stared at the Night Child for a long moment with unblinking eyes before turning to do as she bid him. Razielle slowly approached her adopted uncle's inner Beast, which lay unmoving except for slow the rise and fall of Its chest with Its labored breathing. Carefully, she crept through the growing pool of blood, ignoring the squelch of her boots in the congealing crimson. When she was within scant inches of the Beast's muzzle, she knelt, ignoring the way the knees of her jeans soaked up the thick, cold blood.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she reached out one trembling hand and pressed a gentle palm to the broad snout, between the wicked, curving tusks stained dark with blood. The Beast heaved a heavy sigh and opened Its silver-white eyes to regard her wearily, as if to say, _What, O child? Must you weary me more?_

"Please, Uncle Jason, get up. Please get up."

Something soft and gentle - something almost _human_ - moved behind the mercurial eyes of the legendary creature, but the Beast did not move except to sigh deeply. It was tired, so very tired, and It could feel Its own mortality in the wounds that seeped such red stuff as Its blood. It did not wish to rise, though the kitten-child begged so sweetly. It only wished to sleep… sleep, and never rise. Never rise and answer the Challenge, never rise and engage in brutal and bloody war… never to rise to the half-visions of slaughtered innocents It could do nothing about.

"Please, get up, Uncle Jason. You have to get up, the flames are coming, and Dreaming Tiberius, please!" Razielle begged desperately. She'd only felt so helpless once before, only hours ago, when Sebastian Nox, the bogeyman known only as the Night, had been intent on murdering her _romejul._ Now her uncle refused to save himself after that great and terrible battle against the Dream Prince….

"Please, Uncle Jason, I'm strong, but not strong enough to move something as big as you by myself! I can't do it if you don't help me! Please, get up!"

She pushed futilely at the Beast's heavy, wet as tears ran down her cheeks, but It wouldn't budge. All she succeeded in doing was slicking her hands and arms with bright red blood and covering herself with damp, matted, shed fur.

"Uncle Jason!"

_Jason Gideon, Lord of the Kiss de Carabas, King of Rachet-Upon-the-Sand, Prince of the Fiery Wings, stand up! Upon your feet, Beast of the Old Time! How dare you wallow in your self-imposed death throes, as if your lord and your ladies liege do not require your aid! Stand upon your feet, Jason Gideon! Be the Beast, and hide not from the Challenge and from the Mad Dreamers._

The Beast, at that moment, rolled Its great eye to rest upon that which spoke to It: a she-cat the size of a German shepherd. Her eyes were a deep, crystalline blue, her fur ash white. Around her neck was a strange thing, like shadows and gold thread, a collar woven like a spider's web, and just as thin as an eight-legged widow's silk.

Close behind her followed two other cats, tom cats, both the same size as the she-cat. They merely regarded the Beast with unblinking emerald and copper gold eyes. The white she-cat's cobalt stare did not waver in the least from the mercury gaze of the ancient creature.

Razielle gaped stupidly, and after a long moment, where pieces of the ceiling rained down as tiny bits of smoldering embers and glowing sparks, she managed to whisper, "Paka?"

It could not be! Not Paka the Witch, Paka the great-niece of Tooth and Claw, Paka who was her father's favorite demon she-cat besides the Lady Chaterette. Paka, who had helped the assassin learn to walk as a babe by always being there just when she was about to fall. Paka, who never set foot in the places of mortals….

"_Paka?_"

The cat seemed almost to smile.

_Aye, Daughter of our Marquis. Where is the Lyon with Wings?_

"Paka, what do you-"

"What do you mean here, Demon Cat?" Hotchner demanded, returning to Razielle's side. His chill gaze settled on the huge cats.

The she-cat, Paka, hissed as her fur bristled, and she snapped, _Help the Daughter of the Marquis with the Knight Lyon, Hawking. He is injured. Does your friend and comrade mean nothing to you, Iron Claw?_

"I know that!" Hotch snarled. "And never call me _Hawking!_" And he laid his hands upon the flank of the Beast, ignoring Paka's hiss of _Hawking Iron Claw, Lyon with Wings, Vulture of Thorn…_.

"Come on, Gideon," Hotch snapped, planting his feet and shoving with both hands at the bleeding mass of muscle and fur. "Now is not the time to be doing this to me."

The ancient Beast snarled tiredly, like the snapping of a sleeping cat at a somewhat annoying insect, but heaved Its great bulk upwards, so that It rested upon Its great paws and could move more easily. The three huge cats padded over and pressed their warm bodies against the Beast, urging It towards the Car with purrs, nips, head butts, and yowls.

Hotch kept his hands upon the creature's flank, that inhuman thing moving behind his silver-shined eyes. Razielle tried to ignore the fierce, hawkish gaze.

Right as the group stumbled at the Car's backseat passenger door, the Beast's great body gave a shudder, a shiver, and the fur rippled and practically poured off of It like black water, pooling upon the floor in a pile of steaming darkness as the ceiling began cracking and groaning under the onslaught of the blazing flames. In the embrace of the three cats, the Night Child, and Hotch leaned Jason Gideon, seemingly human again, slipping quietly to the floor, bleeding from hundreds of battle wounds, with a silver crossbow bolt sunk deep in his right side. In his form of man, Razielle had no trouble lifting her uncle and getting him into the Car's dark, safe interior with Hotch's help.

The Car shrieked with joy and fury as it raced out of the great building, just as the roof collapsed behind it in a shower of sparks.

.

_Her killer instinct tells her to  
Be aware of evil men...._

_No more blame,  
He has felt too much pain...._

_If you're going through Hell  
Keep on moving  
Don't slow down  
If you're scared don't show it  
You might get out  
Before the Devil even knows you're there_

**.**

Gideon lay upon the impossibly large furthest backseat of the Car, his head in Razielle's lap as Hotch laid his hand over the other man's heart, his eyes melting to liquid gold like a pool of sunlight in summer. Hotchner's shoulders flexed and rippled with movement, but he showed no other sign of agitation.

The three gargantuan cats lay upon the floor, their brilliant fur stark against the black matting beneath. Paka, the white she-cat, watched with eyes cool as ice as Gideon groaned in pain and opened his own.

"Sorry to scare you like that, baby girl," he whispered. "How's Reid?"

Razielle glanced at Spencer for a long moment, saw he was paler than normal, sweating, and biting his lip as if in pain. As she watched him, one of the other great cats- Lejon, a tom-cat- leapt upon the seat beside Reid and laid his great head upon the man's knee, staring up at him with great, green eyes amongst gray fur like smoke. He held himself a little less stiffly at that point, as if the pain were not so great.

"He's fine," she whispered.

"What the heck is going on?!" Garcia suddenly burst out. "What are those things?" Pointing at the cats. "What's wrong with Reid and Gideon? Who were those people who attacked us?!"

Gideon groaned again.

"Those," Razielle whispered, gesturing to the three cats, "are demon cats- not to be mistaken for cat demons. Those three belong to my father: Paka the Ivory Witch, Lejon the Sage, and Tier of the Tiger Teeth." At his name, the other demon cat, a male with pale copper fur and bronze dark stripes, lifted his head and bared his teeth.

"That's enough, beast," Hotch snarled, and the cat began to rise.

"As Daughter of the Marquis and mistress of the Car, I demand that all personal feuds be laid aside until I deem it expedient to decree otherwise," Razielle snapped without looking up from her adopted uncle's face. She stroked his cheek, wiping away the blood seeping from cuts on his face with a piece of her shirt. A bit more gently, she added, "The journey to the Cradle begins. We can't afford fights among us, not now. We're being hunted, and the Elder Ones know when we'll be caught and attacked. We must be at peace, here in the Car and through the climbing ladder."

"Climbing ladder?" Morgan whispered.

"Don't ask questions, Morgan," Gideon replied softly, struggling for even breath. "You'll only get confused. The journey begins; that's all we need to know right now."

"Well," Hotch said softly. "That and how to pull out the barb of Caligula's arrow without killing you."

"Yeah," Gideon replied, grimacing as Razielle wrapped one slim, white hand around the shaft. "And that. I'm braced," he added, and she ripped the bolt from his side, spraying blood all over herself, as the car hurtled towards the Cradle.

**.**

_And though the paths that I have traveled __  
__Have tread against the flow __  
__There is no need for sorrow __  
__For I am coming home _

_Can you hear the cat within the box? _

**.**

**.**

**.**

**Author's Note:** okay, revamped chapter, new stuff and new lyrics. This chapter is almost 3000 words, so hope you like.

**Copyright Info:**

Section1, line 1: _Love and Hatred_, by the Cruxshadows

Section 1, remaining: _Rest in Peace_, from Buffy the Musical Episode

Middle section, lines 1-2: _Pretty Girl_ by Sugarcult

Middle section, lines 3-4: _Not Like the Other Girls_ by the Rasmus

Rest of middle section: _If You're Going Through Hell_ by... somebody?

Last section: _Return (I Am Coming Home)_ and _Love and Hatred_ by the Cruxshadows


	14. Ten Things

**Ten Things**

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.

Okay guys. Here's what's going on.

**One**- I'm supposed to be getting married in 2 months (middle of December about) and I have things to plan. It's taking up a lot of my time. I apologize, but there it is.

**Two**- I'm desperately trying to get a job. After all, hubby can't support me and himself all by his lonesome.

**Three**- My comp is broken, so I only have computer access between5 and 11 in the morning. I can't get up at5 every day unless I go to bed at 8 or 9 the night before, and sometimes stuff comes up that prevents me from sleeping until midnight or later.

**Four**- I was out of town and unavailable on the comp for 5 days, the last day of which was this past Wednesday.

**Five**- I had inspiration for another fic in the few days beforeI went out of town, a House, MD/vampire fic called "_Suck_."

**Six**- I've been desperately struggling to get through _Eragon_ and _Eldest_ by Christopher Paolini because his 3rd book, _Brisingr_, just came out and I only have 2 weeks to read the thing.

**Seven- **I've been getting ready for Halloween.

**Eight-** I've been watchinga lot of TV: House, MD; the Mentalist;Criminal Minds; Law & Order: Criminal Intent; CSI: Las Vegas; NCIS; and Young Dracula, cutest vampire show for preteens ever.

**Nine- **I've been working on a romance novella for Harlequin-Silhouette's Nocturne Bites, and it's taken a while to get it finished. I finally got my last critique back from my Grandma on Tuesday (big romance and vampire fan). Now I just have to send it in to HS.

**Ten,**** _and most importantly_**- My grandfather died of cancer on Thursday, so I haven't really felt like writing much since then.

I'm sorry guys, but "_Demons of the Mind_" and "_Blood in the Water, Blood on the Ice_"are on hold for a while. Not too long- a week or so more, that's it. I apologize for the delay, and I hope to punch out the next chapter soon. Until then, bare with me.

.

Loves to all my readers,

_LA Knight_

_._

_._

**PS-** If any of you have a song idea in mind for the next chapter of "Blood..." I'd appreciate a suggestion. The last song I used was "Walking in the Air." Check out the Celtic Woman version here: www. youtube. com/ watch? v fl-iM8kpiuE. Remove the spaces.

**PPS**- Soon I'm putting together a Demons of the Mind playlist, under the name "NightmareDolly" on Youtube. Check it out on Nov. 1.


	15. 12 Cats in the Cradle

**Black Cat, White Moon**

**Chapter Twelve  
Cats in the Cradle**

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.

_And the last thing I heard __  
__Was a muttered word__  
__As he knelt above me __  
__With a rock in his fist_

**.**

Esse the Sloe-Eyed, one of the few original witches from the old tales of her people's history, still as pretty and petite as she had been in those days, rubbed her stomach as another stabbing pain shot through her. So her supper was proving a bit difficult to carry, was he?

Interesting.

She had to admit, Lord Gideon had been right about her own kind tasting better than human children baked in gingerbread batter. They also did wonders for her complexion- Sebastian had taken off almost seven years. Now she was the cutest little witch-toddler anyone had ever seen, and just because she looked five years old didn't mean she was in any way diminished from her original levels of power.

Another pain lanced through her tummy, and suddenly a tickling in the back of her throat made her cough delicately into her fist. When she pulled her hand away, she saw her skin speckled with dark blood.

"What... what the-"

She couldn't finish, though, because another pain, this time like a blade of molten fire, cut through her from pelvis to clavicle, and she fell to her knees, hacking and coughing as blood dribbled from between her lips.

"Gideon..."

"Do you need help, Miss?" At the sound of the man's voice, she looked up into the kindly, concerned eyes of a police officer. He knelt down, taking her gently in his arms. "Are you alright, Miss? You look like you need some help." In the face of such statements of the obvious, she almost laughed, but her belly cramped. Obviously, this human was short a few screws. "Actually, Miss," he added, shifting her in his arms. "I'm not."

At this, she looked up, because his voice had become poisonously cold, and Esse saw him raise a fist clutching a jagged stone, and bring it down on the bridge of her nose. In the moment of agonizing pain, as she felt something cut into the flesh of her stomach and the cartilage of her nose explode, everything went dark.

**.**

_And if you aren't shakin'__  
__There's somethin' very wrong...__  
__'Cause I'm the bogeyman..._

**.**

Sebastian Nox struggled to his feet. Really, you'd think the FBI would be a little more particular about who they let work for them. Didn't they know that a single armed adult was enough to handle Esse the Sloe-Eyed? She was barely bigger than a human child.

Esse herself lay in a pool of blood, dazed and half-unconscious from the blow to the face she'd received from one of the "local police." Local police who also moonlighted as a vigilante. Of course the people here in LA knew about the people out of fairytales, and knew how to deal with them. Well, relatively speaking. There was no dealing with Esse, really. The best you could do was bash her over the head and hope you knocked her out the first time, then do what you needed to do and get out of town before she woke up and decided to make a snack out of one of your treasured body parts. She was one of the few who were so old, it was almost impossible to kill them.

Kind of like Sebastian himself. After all, it took a very creative person to actually manage to kill a bogeyman. All you ever really managed to do was slow them down a little bit, and when they got back on their feet, they just started to come after you again.

After all, Razielle had inflicted a lot of pain. Even now, the hinges of his knees squeeled like rusty gate hinges whenever he took a step. And they _**HURT!!**_ And that human had attacked him, for crying out loud! Shot off his fingers! The bullet had lodged in his hip- which also squeaked like rusted metal and hurt like hell fire. Sebastian was going to kill both of those troublesome women, if it was the last thing he did.

After he killed Spencer Reid.

**.**

_The tears of snow-white sorrow__  
__Caress the one, the hiding amaranth__  
__In a land of the daybreak...__  
__In this brief flight of time we reach__  
__For the ones...__  
__Reaching, searching for..._

_She's fading away  
Away from this world  
Drifting like a feather...._

**.**

She was icy, but not cold. You could see it in her eyes, in the burning diamond shards of her gaze. They were so cold, her eyes like the frigid void of space, that to look in her eyes was to feel your heart freeze to ice in your chest. To look upon her was to die a brutal death.

She was in agony, but she was not hurt. Anyone could see that in her eyes as well, and in the way she moved like an old woman with a bad hip, and the way she glanced often at the great portrait hanging over her huge, marble fireplace. A man dressed in lace and velvet, a dozen children of various ages in various forms of dress, and she herself, in a simple gown, wings spread wide. They were the royal family of Cat's Cradle. And now... now they were scattered, separated across the worlds... and she needed her daughter. She needed Razielle now, her eldest daughter, the heir to the Kiss de Carabas.

Shekinah stared out the window of her bedroom, out across the world to the pale horizon, where the sun crept slowly into the shadowed sky. Even Sarastro's light could not force the gloom from the heavens this day. Ever since the Marquis had disappeared....

_Where are you, my daughter? I need you. We all need you. Where are you?_

Razielle had to come. When she arrived, there would be no fighting, no yelling, no screaming, no throwing heavy, breakable objects. Shekinah would make peace with her gentle, not-so-bloodthirsty daughter.

Or everything would be lost.

**.**

_Over the mountains and the seas__  
__A prisoner's life for him there'll be...__  
__Each night within his prison cell__  
__He looks out through the bars...__  
__One day he'll know the taste of freedom._

**.**

Everything was lost.

The Hunter knew it in his very bones. He would have had to be an idiot not to know it. Because, the Hunter knew, he was in no state to escape this trap. And so he was in no state to rescue the children caught in this trap as well, or the human woman who seemed not at all surprised by the creatures holding them captive. He thought perhaps she might be mad, but it didn't matter if she was. It was the mad ones who had always been able to see the truth behind the fairytales. Just like the mortal who had given his life to save the Marquis so long ago....

"When's Raze coming, Papa?" His youngest daughter whispered, tucking herself against his side. She didn't seem to mind the blood pumping from the gunshot wound in his ribs, soaking her dress. Lilya just wanted to be close to him.

Closing his eyes tiredly, the Marquis de Carabas said, "She'll come soon. She's surely received our enemies' message by now." He put his hand on the little girl's shoulder. She didn't mind the blood pumping steadily from the stump where his finger used to be, either. His children never gave blood a second thought. It was so much a part of their lives.

"What about Mama?"

"Your mother and your sister will find us, my little one. Have no fear."

But he had fear - because the bleeding from his wounds should have stopped by now, and it hadn't. It hadn't stopped, and in fact hadn't even slowed down. It was just as steady and strong as when they'd shot him, as when they'd hacked off his finger. He could imagine what that meant - magic, science, divine intervention of the brimstone and sulfuric flavor. Or it could just mean he was getting old. He didn't know and didn't care.

But he had to save his children, before he bled to death from the wounds that the Lady of the Black Glass had inflicted on him. If he died, then the Ancients only knew what the twisted sorceress would do to the children. He had to save them.

Somehow.

**.**

_And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon__  
__Little girl blue and the man on the moon__  
__When you comin' home girl?__  
__I don't know when, but we'll get together then__  
__You know we'll have a good time then_

_I love you  
Does that mean I have to meet your mother?__  
__I love you  
But does that mean I have to walk on water?_

**.**

Razielle stared out the window, everything inside her twisting and burning. She was nearly home - she could feel it in the way her heartbeat thumped inside her, the way the Car purred like a contented cat. Paka, Lejon, and Tier were purring like mad, rubbing themselves against Gideon, who was also looking better the closer they got to the Cradle.

They had managed to stop the bleeding from the wound - but that was because Razielle hadn't gone in looking for the poisonous barb that had been attached to the great dart in Gideon's side. Instead, she'd made sure he wasn't near death, and told the Car to hurry it up. Then she went to sit beside Reid, who was looking pale. Whereas before, the demon cats had been rubbing against him to ease his pain, now it was her turn. She pressed her cheek to the line of his jaw, purring softly to comfort him and herself. Her fingers kneaded his shoulders, not for him, but for her.

"What's wrong with me?" The young genius mumbled. Every time he turned his head, his nose caught a strange, sweet scent. It was almost as if it were coming from Razielle's hands. "Razielle?"

The huntress pressed her cheek to his - his flesh was sweaty and feverish, hers dry and cool. His eyes glistened in their sockets. A sharp spike of fear slid into her heart like a stake.

"Poison," the Night Child murmured, desperate to keep her voice steady. The fear forced it to tremble. "Don't worry. My people can heal you. Come here."

They shifted, so that his head was resting against the swell of her breast, her arms around his thin frame as they hurtled through what she had called "the climbling ladder." The climbing ladder... the ladder was the woven path that back led to the Cradle... her birth place. She needed to get there, and soon, before Reid grew any worse.

_Almost there, Mistress,_ the Car rumbled in her skull, V8 growls in her mind.

_Hurry_, she replied, caressing Spencer's burning cheek. Moments later, they fell out of the strange place between the worlds known as the climbing ladder, pulling up in front of Trollesund, her father's castle.

.

_Promise me....  
I love you so  
Never let go....  
He loved her_

**.**

.

.

**Disclaimer/Author's Note:** I don't own anything you recognize. Revamped, more information, etc. In some of the song lyrics, I changed the gender pronouns and nouns to make them fit the scene, such as: father to mother, she to he, etc. This chapter is 2000+ words.

Copyright Info:

Section 1: Where the Wild Roses Grow by Nick Cave, feat. Kylie Minogue

Section 2: Oogie Boogie's Song, the Nightmare Before Christmas

Section 3, part 1: Amaranth, by Nightwish

Section 3, part 2: Not Like the Other Girls, by the Rasmus

Section 4: Over the Hills and Far Away, by Led Zepplin, covered by Nightwish

Section 5, part 1: Cat's in the Cradle (I think)

Section 5, part 2: Simple and Clean by Hikaru Utada

Last section: Ghost of a Rose, by Blackmore's Night


End file.
